Quotes About Leadership

If this were so; it meant the people I knew didn't belong in the governing class. And the other people did. And I intended to be in the governing class. If they proved too hard for me I would quit, but until I made the effort I would not quit. And find out if I was too weak to hold my own. -Theodore Roosevelt

Still, Roosevelt noted, it was "not always easy to strike the just middle," and he inevitably made mistakes.

Progressives (a combination of Midwestern

power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.

persuaded editors and publishers at a dozen leading

It was said in the office "that Sam had three hundred ideas a minute, but only JSP knew which one was not crazy.

If I am ever to be remembered," Johnson wistfully told me, "it will be for civil rights.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

faith never foundered that if the people "were taken into the confidence of their government and received a full and truthful statement of what was happening, they would generally choose the right course.

Roosevelt repeatedly "brought his clenched fist down on the palm of his other hand.

On July 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln convened a special session of his cabinet to reveal—not to debate—his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.

Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. "Do not answer Bryan; attack him!" he counseled in early September, adding, "Don't let him make the issues.

Generations of historians have agreed with Holmes, pointing to Roosevelt's self-assured, congenial, optimistic temperament as the keystone to his leadership success.

For nearly two years, under Lyndon Johnson's domestic leadership, Republicans and Democrats had toiled together to engineer the greatest advances in civil rights since the Civil War and to launch a comprehensive, progressive vision of American society that would leave a permanent imprint on the national landscape.

As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. "It is never well to take drastic action," he liked to say, "if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail," Abraham Lincoln said, "without it nothing can succeed.

So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.

No cosmic dramatist could possibly devise a better entrance for a new President—or a new Dictator, or a new Messiah—than that accorded to Franklin Roosevelt," White House aide Robert Sherwood observed, aligning himself with those who believe that a leader is summoned to the fore by the needs of the time.

A finely developed sense of timing—knowing when to wait and when to act—would remain in Lincoln's repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt," one biographer has suggested, "is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them.

People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.

be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country." The standards

Wherever a tension needed the solvent of good-will, or friction the oil of benevolence; wherever suspicion needed the antidote of frankness, or wounded pride the disinfectant of a hearty laugh—there Taft was sent.