Leader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

There is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone. This would nevertheless require a courageous change of attitude on the part of political leaders.

Perhaps in His wisdom the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building.

Eleanor Roosevelt

A leader is useless when he acts against the promptings of his own conscience.

No ladder needs the bird but skies To situate its wings, Nor any leaders grim baton Arraigns it as it sings.

Emily Dickinson

You shouldn't blindly accept a leader's advice. You've got to question leaders on occasion.

Richard Branson

The problem facing our people here in America is bigger than all other personal or organizational differences. Therefore as leaders, we must stop worrying about the threat we seem to think we pose to each other's personal prestige; and concentrate our united efforts towards solving the unending hurt that is being done daily to our people here in America.

Nothing is more odious than the majority, for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and submissive weaklings, and a mass of men who trot after them without thinking, or knowing their own minds.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A great leader has to be flexible, holding his ground on the major principles but finding room for compromises that can bring people together. A great leader has to be savvy at negotiations so we don't drown every bill in pork barrel bridges to nowhere. I know how to stand my ground — but I also know that Republicans and Democrats need to find common ground to stand on as well.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher -- a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Even when the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference.... In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our country needs a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal. We need a leader that can bring back our jobs, can bring back our manufacturing, can bring back our military, can take care of our vets. Our vets have been abandoned. And we also need a cheerleader.... We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again. It's not great again.

The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.

The liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, that period in the eighteenth-century Europe when intellectuals and political leaders had a powerful sense that reason could be employed to make the world a better place.

John Mearsheimer

Who will demand accountability for the failure of our national political leadership involved in the management of this war? They have unquestionably been derelict in the performance of their duty. In my profession, these types of leaders would immediately be relieved or court martialed.

Ricardo Sanchez

Most leaders would agree that they'd be better off having an average strategy with superb execution than a superb strategy with poor execution. Those who execute always have the upper hand.

An attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence and power…[has] divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

When executives lead as teachers, stewards, and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle and long-term than those of power-wielding hierarchical leaders.

When we were jailed, Pussy Riot immediately became very popular and widely known, and it turned from just a group to essentially an international movement. Anybody can be Pussy Riot, you just need to put on a mask and stage an active protest of something in your particular country, wherever that may be, that you consider unjust. And we're not here as the leaders of Pussy Riot or determining what Pussy Riot is and what it does or what it says. We are just two individuals that spent two years in jail for taking part in a Pussy Riot protest action.

Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others.

John C. Maxwell

Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.

The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives.

Instead of learned young people we have donkeys with University degrees. Instead of future leaders we have mollusks with expensive blue jeans and phony revolutionaries with ski masks. And do you know what? Maybe this is another reason why our Moslem invaders have such an easy game.

Many modifications in private and public life took place. Privacy ceasing to exist, all new houses were glass-built, curtains abolished, walls pulled down. Police went, the entire legal structure vanished overnight — a man does not litigate against himself. A parody of Parliament remained, to deal with foreign affairs, but party politics, elections, leaders in newspapers (even newspapers themselves) were scrapped.

Once capitalist classes learn to live with unions — which they generally do reluctantly, only after efforts to crush them have failed — they then attempt to co-opt organized labour. They do so by courting a "special relationship" with union leaders who, as their organizations become larger and more complex, typically assume the role of full time union functionaries.