Quotes About Leadership

Boys, here's where I cash in my chips.[House judiciary committee chairman Hatton Summers(D) to Vice President John Nance Garner about Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to 'pack the court'.]

It's philanthropy, but it's good politics, too. Mighty good politics. The poor are some of the most grateful people in the world. George Washington Plunkett.

Reagan is described as delivering Barry Goldwater's doctrine with John F. Kennedy's technique.

When an acquaintance commiserated upon hearing of the loss of America's capital, Franklin replied, "You mistake the matter. Instead of Howe taking Philadelphia, Philadelphia has taken Howe.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

CONSERVATIVES IN MODERN America face a chronic problem in running for office. Often believing government to be the enemy, they have to explain to themselves and others why they want to join that enemy.

People say, 'If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better.' I say the Congress is too damn representative. It's just as stupid as the people are, just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish.

Gen. Scott saw more through the eyes of his staff officers than through his own.

His strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation with an eloquence that brought comfort and resilience to a nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem," Reagan recalled. "I will never forget him for that.

He made his character his platform.

J.P. Morgan learned to fish in troubled waters.

Poorly prepared conclusions that wander about looking for an exit line leave a congregation looking toward the exit.

People don't have the imagination to understand politicians. People are too innocent

This same strain of transcendent "love-your-enemies" thinking guided Young, Abernathy, and the others as they began to contemplate their leader's death. As Young put it, "We aren't so much concerned with who killed Martin, as with what killed him." It

War is the unfolding of miscalculations. —BARBARA TUCHMAN

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility: he can never admit an error.....The propaganda effect of infallibility, the striking success of posing as a mere interpreting agent of predictable forces, has encouraged in totalitarian dictators the habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of prophecy....Mass leaders in power have one concern wich overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne."81

A valid and comparatively permanent appointment would indeed presuppose the existence of a clique whose members would share the Leader's monopoly of knowledge of what is going on, which the Leader must avoid by all means.

Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers, the National Security Managers, as they have been recently called by Richard Barnet, who exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and interpreting the outside world for him.

businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and "thought in continents

The Jewish notables (as they were called in the nineteenth century) ruled the Jewish communities, but they did not belong to them socially or even geographically.

both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.86