Quotes About Leadership

It never occurred to me that they might not accept it, yet looking back I am astonished that the battle of Cynuit was fought according to the idea of a twenty-year-old who had never stood in a slaughter wall. Yet I was tall, I was a lord, I had grown up among warriors, and I had the arrogant confidence of a man born to battle. I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, son of another Uhtred, and we had not held Bebbanburg and its lands by whimpering at altars. We are warriors.

If we do nothing then Wessex will spread like a plague. There'll be priests everywhere." We seek the future. We stare into its fog and hope to see a landmark that will make sense of fate.

Wessex. At the very least Alfred would pay

all the Danish leaders, had carved into our shield wall with his great war ax, I had faced him, beaten him, and sent him to join the einherjar, that army of the dead who feast and swive in Odin's corpse hall. What

She was a widow now, but she still ruled Ragnar's great fortress of Dunholm, which, after Bebbanburg, was the most formidable stronghold in Northumbria.

All you need to know, boy, Finan growled, is that Lord Uhtred's side is the one that wins.

Man make a kingdom strong, not gold.

So much is expected of a king. He must be brave i battle, wise i council, just in judgement.

were in the camp, given a day's rest after leading the last failed assault. Will Skeat hated failure.

But Alfred could not live long. He was already an old man, well past forty years, and now he was looking to the future. He

If you wait for certainty in war, lord king, you'll die waiting.

it's a foolish king who doesn't listen to his advisers. -It's a foolish king, who doesn't know which advisers to trust.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

For now you have only Mahomet and his dupes, and the Maid and her dupes; but what will it be when every girl thinks herself a Joan and every man a Mahomet?

Stout Gudleif kneeled and spiked the shaft of his spear into the ground, then dug into the fresh snow with his hands and formed a snowball. The snow crunched softly as he pressed it. Gudleif looked to Mandred, and the jarl nodded. The snowball flew in a wide arc into the bush. Nothing moved.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.

The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation.

The problem of finding a collection of "wise" men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.

It is a curious fact that the more democratic a country becomes, the less respect it has for its rulers. Aristocracies and foreign conquerors may be hated but they are not despised.

When the qualities that now confer leadership have become universal, there will no longer be leaders and followers, and democracy will have been realized at last.

The tragedy of one successful politician after another is the gradual substitution of narcissism for an interest in the community and the measures for which he stands.

The rulers of the world have always been stupid, but have not in the past been so powerful as they are now. It is therefore more important than it used to be to find some way of securing that they shall be intelligent. Is this problem insoluble? I do not think so, but I should be the last to maintain that it is easy.

Every organisation, whatever its character and whatever its purpose, involves some redistribution of power. There must be a government, which takes decisions in the name of the whole body, and has more power than the single members have, at any rate as regards the purposes for which the organisation exists.