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"A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune."
-Anon.
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If you get too far in front of your troops, you start looking like the enemy.
-Anon.
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The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull. This is not always easy to achieve.
-Dean Acheson
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"The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it."
"quoted by Rex Seline in Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram"
-Elaine Agather
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All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.
-W. H. Auden
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"Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning."
-Warren Bennis
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Leaders learn by leading, and they learn best by leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.
-Warren Bennis
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Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult.
-Warren Bennis
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"I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod."
-Sir Winston Churchill
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If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles.
-Karl von Clausewitz
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When people go to work, they don’t leave their hearts at home. We may live in a high-tech world, but leadership is still a high-touch job.
-Lee J. Colan, Passionate Performance
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"The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant."
-Max De Pree, "Leadership Is an Art"
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Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
-Peter Drucker
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In order to be a leader a man must have followers. And to have followers, a man must have their confidence. Hence, the supreme quality for a leader is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office. If a man's associates find him guilty of being phony, if they find that he lacks forthright integrity, he will fail. His teachings and actions must square with each other. The first great need, therefore is integrity and high purpose.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help;- other great men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let me never hear that man's name again." They cry up the virtues of George Washington,- "Damn George Washington!" is the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But it is human nature's indispensable defense. The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson - Volume IV - Representative Men "Uses of Great Men", 1850
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"In simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up, and goes."
-John Erskine, The Complete Life
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There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead and the ability to lead, and even less the ability to lead somewhere that will be to the advantage of the led...
-Bergen Evans
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Although leadership and the exercise of power are distinguishable activities, they overlap and interweave in important ways. Consider a corporate chief executive officer who has the gift for inspiring and motivating people, who has vision, who lifts the spirits of employees with a resulting rise in productivity and quality of product, and a drop in turnover and absenteeism. That is leadership. But evidence emerges that the company is falling behind in the technology race. One day with the stroke of a pen the CEO increases the funds available to the research division. That is the exercise of power. The stroke of a pen could have been made by an executive with none of the qualities one associates with leadership.
-John W. Gardner, On Leadership, ch. 6, Free Press (1990)
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"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency."
-Arnold Glasgow
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The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet.
-Theodore Hesburgh
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The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader's following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies.
As soon as the vacillating masses find themselves facing an opposition that is made up of different groups of enemies their sense of objectivity will be aroused and they will ask how is it that all the others can be in the wrong and they themselves, and their movement, alone in the right.
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. 3, 1925
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"The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
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GOD, give us men! A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office can not buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
In public duty, and in private thinking;
For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,
Their large professions and their little deeds,
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,
Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps.
-Josiah Gilbert Holland
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"The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, 'Go!' - a leader says, 'Let's go!'"
-E. M. Kelly, Growing Disciples, 1995
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Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
-Henry Kissinger
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"The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'"
-Lao-Tzu
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"The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself."
-Blaine Lee, The Power Principle
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"The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players."
-Blaine Lee, The Power Principle
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"The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
-Walter Lippmann
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"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on."
-Walter Lippmann
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There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things..... Whenever his enemies have occasion to attack the innovator they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend him sluggishly so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable.
-Niccolo Machiavelli, source date 1513
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He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
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"To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less."
-André Malraux, Man's Hope
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"The ultimate leader is one who is willing to develop people to the point that they eventually surpass him or her in knowledge and ability."
-Fred A. Manske, Jr.
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Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men--the other 999 follow women.
-Groucho Marx
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"The most important quality in a leader is that of being acknowledged as such. All leaders whose fitness is questioned are clearly lacking in force."
-André Maurois, The Art of Living
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In motivating people, you've got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example - and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.
-Rupert Murdoch
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"Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy."
-Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf
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"Leaders are the ones who keep faith with the past, keep step with the present and keep the promise to posterity."
-Harold J. Seymore
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'All Mr. Pitt's sentiments were liberal and elevated. His ruling passion was an unbounded ambition, which, when supported by great abilities and crowned with great success, make (sic) what the world calls "a great man." He was haughty, imperious, impatient of contradiction, and over-bearing; qualities which too often accompany, but always clog, great ones…. His eloquence was of every kind, and he excelled in the argumentative as well as in the declamatory way. But his invectives were terrible, and uttered with such energy of diction, and stern dignity of action and countenance, that he intimidated those who were the most willing and the best able to encounter him. Their arms fell out of their hands, and they shrunk under the ascendant which his genius gained over theirs.'
-Philip Dormer Stanhope, Character of Mr. Pitt; Chesterfield's Works. Appendix to vol. iv. p. 64.
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Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
-Publilius Syrus
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"Reason and judgment are the qualities of a leader."
-Tacitus
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"No amount of study or learning will make a man a leader unless he has the natural qualities of one."
-Archibald Wavell, "London Times", February 17, 1941
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Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power; whether he is trapped by responsibility or made free by it; whether he is moved by other people and outer forces or moves them - this is of the essence of leadership.
-Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1960
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He who leads
Must then be strong and hopeful as the dawn
That rises unafraid and full of joy
Above the blackness of the darkest night.
He must be kind to every living thing;
Kind as the Krishna, Buddha and the Christ,
And full of love for all created life.
Oh, not in war shall his great prowess lie,
Nor shall he find his pleasure in the chase.
Too great for slaughter, friend of man and beast,
Touching the borders of the Unseen Realms
And bringing down to earth their mystic fires
To light our troubled pathways, wise and kind
And human to the core, so shall he be,
The coming leader of the coming time.
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox, from "The Leader to Be"
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It is comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Books about Leadership
