Leadership Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Narcissism is often the driving force behind the desire to obtain a leadership position.

Manfred Kets de Vries

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

James A. Michener

After the Shah's departure from Iran, I will not become a president nor accept any other leadership role. Just like before, I limit my activities only to guiding and directing the people.

Ruhollah Khomeini

Indignation and compassion form a powerful combination. They are indispensable to vision, and therefore to leadership.

China, up to 50 years ago, was completely non-homogenous, being compartmented into groups divided against each other. The war-making tendency was almost non-existent, as they still followed the tenets of the Confucian ideal of pacifist culture. At the turn of the century, under the regime of Chang Tso Lin, efforts toward greater homogeneity produced the start of a nationalist urge. This was further and more successfully developed under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, but has been brought to its greatest fruition under the present regime to the point that it has now taken on the character of a united nationalism of increasingly dominant, aggressive tendencies.

Douglas MacArthur

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, perhaps better known by its nickname Gitmo, is an affront to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the legacy of our national heritage. It should be closed now, and all the people detained there returned to the place where they were seized. In this I wholeheartedly endorse the view of my friend and fellow veteran R. J. Harris who says that Guantanamo is a stain on the U.S. and the U.S. military. Like R.J., I'm ashamed of our leadership for allowing it. The prison facility at Guantanamo Bay does more than just blur the line between the good guys and the bad guys; it erases the line entirely.

You must take proactive action now to ensure you have the right leadership that will bring the right environment so that when your kids get bigger they have a better working environment in Kenya.

You've passed the first test of leadership. You've disagreed with me.

Women, in general, are not part of the corruption of the past, so they can give a new kind of leadership, a new image for mankind.

Coretta Scott King

The cost of downsizing, re-sizing, or right-sizing eclipses what it would have cost to unleash the pent up leadership already inside the organization.

LEADERSHIP A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it'll be someone else's bones which go crack and not their own.

Sustainable leadership does no harm to and actively improves the surrounding environment.

Andy Hargreaves (academic)

The inability of business and political leadership to rise to new heights [required by the] unprecedented situation, [familiar to us now as the Great Depression.. urged for] bold policies...bold anything is needed at this time.

Wallace Brett Donham

When you read Genesis, you find that it was Adam who was given the specific instruction not to eat the fruit of the tree. You see, Adam was created first, and God had ordained that he was to be the head of his family. He then gave Adam instruction as to what was expected of him. Adam, of course, would've told Eve, because she was really under his headship. Therefore, when Eve took the fruit, Adam shouldn't have joined her. He should've gone directly to God and asked for a solution. Instead, he joined his wife and brought sin and death into the world. You know, this is a lesson we need to learn today about men taking the leadership role in their families.

One of the crucial problems we have as a party is that we have brought our leadership in from much too narrow a group. Basically Oxbridge graduates, in particular economics graduates, politics graduates, social scientists and lawyers. We need to reconnect to working-class communities, we have to reconnect to ethnic minority communities and bring up real leaders from within the people we represent.

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman

Your company may have a reputation for brilliant leadership, outstanding innovation, clever branding and effective change management, but the business could fail if the world changes and you are unprepared.

"This warrior says you must fight him for the leadership," said Bran, and Kull, eyes glittering with growing battle-joy, nodded: "I guessed as much. Give us space."
"A shield and a helmet!" shouted Bran, but Kull shook his head.
"I need none," he growled. "Back and give us room to swing our steel!"

Robert E. Howard

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, leadership is in the eyes of the led.

That's the art of leadership. To make sure that what shouldn't happen, doesn't happen.

The Republic of South Africa has a new formula under the National Party's leadership: black nations can get freedom without firing shots or revolution.

... engaged themselves in mainly exposing the policies and programmes of the bourgeois leaders including Gandhi without participating in these struggles and sharing their bitter experience. The result was that the bourgeois leadership and the people were getting closer to each other.

E. M. S. Namboodiripad

Leadership of a world-economy is an experience of power which may blind the victor to the march of history.

Fernand Braudel

This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

Carter G. Woodson

In truth, modern life requires many people of talent and intelligence to run big institutions, including governments. Others resent their quality wherever they find it. They see it as oppressive. Then Donald Trump came before them and sneered at government leadership, in a style that had nothing to do with talent or intelligence.... To accomplish this, his followers needed only to mark a ballot. Soon he looked like the man they always needed. In the future, this strategy may well be called Trumpism. For now, American journalists call it populism.

Robert Fulford (journalist)

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.