Leadership Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Honest people know that the road to success and virtue always involves shared sacrifice, hard work, and gratification postponed. Telling people otherwise isn't leadership, it is pandering.

While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs.

This is the only leadership life I get, my one and only shot at following God the way I feel him prompting me to do so. This isn't some pre-game warm-up. It's the game, and the clock is ticking!

This duality, making yourself better while teaching and developing others' judgment capabilities, is the key to leadership that is both productive and principled.

In all forms of leadership, whether you are a coach, a CEO, or a parent, there are four words that, when said, can bring out the best in your team, your employees, and your family. I BELIEVE IN YOU. Those four words can mean the difference between a fear of failure and the courage to try.

Mike Krzyzewski

Leadership has less to do with position than it does with disposition.

John C. Maxwell

Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

Clayton M. Christensen

How does humility manifest itself in leadership and in life? A humble person is more concerned about what is right than about being right, about acting on good ideas than having the ideas, about embracing new truth than defending outdated position, about building the team than exalting self, about recognizing contribution than being recognized for making it.

It isn't polls or public opinion at the moment that counts. It is right and wrong and leadership--men with fortitude, honesty, and a belief in the right that makes epochs in the history of the world.

Harry S. Truman

When we don't take God too seriously, others don't take our leadership too seriously!

Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership.

We must act as if our institutions are ours to create, our learning is ours to define, our leadership we seek is ours to become.

Guard your integrity as if it's your most precious leadership possession, because that is what it is.

Great things happen nationally when topmost leadership is goaded and supported from below.

John Gardner (American writer)

Most significant of all was the success of Robespierre and the central Montagnard leadership to turn the revered memory of their fallen comrade to a potent weapon in the Jacobin triumph over the Gironde, who thereafter could convincingly be portrayed as destabilizers or fomenters of civil war for their role in the assassination of a great patriot.

Clifford D. Conner

Leadership transitions require us to move out of our comfort zone.

The truth is that when your people don't tell you what you need to know, it's a failure of leadership.

True leadership strengthens the followers. It is a process of teaching, setting an example, and empowering others. If you seek to lead, your ability will ultimately be measured in the successes of those around you.

The person who scored well on an SAT will not necessarily be the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best businessman. These tests do not measure character, leadership, creativity, perseverance.

William Julius Wilson

Leadership that is entirely self-directed will always be pathological. The only thing worse than worshipping an idol is to act like an idol.

Great leadership is not the visit of an unexpected fate but rather a flame which is kept burning in spite of the winds of risk and opposition.

Mary Anne Radmacher

Self-sacrifice is essential to leadership. You will give, give all the time.

Leadership in the church is not entrusted to successful fund raisers, brilliant biblical scholars, administrative geniuses, or spellbinding preachers...but to those who have been laid waste by a consuming passion for Christ - passionate men and women for whom privilege and power are trivial compared to knowing and loving Jesus.

Brennan Manning

The goal of leadership is not to eradicate uncertainty but rather to navigate it.

I should say tact was worth much more than wealth as a road to leadership.... I mean that subtle apprehension which teaches a person how to do and say the right thing at the right time. It coexists with very ordinary qualities, and yet many great geniuses are without it. Of all human qualities I consider it the most convenient--not always the highest; yet I would rather have it than many more shining qualities.

M. E. W. Sherwood