Quotes About Leadership

Even if Democrats do succeed, it won't save us. While there are many great Democrats and many exceptions to the trends I have described in this book, by and large the story has been a disappointing one. We have surveyed this party's thoughts and deeds from the Seventies to the present, we have watched them abandon whole classes and regions and industries, and we know now what the results have been. Their leadership faction has no intention of doing what the situation requires.

Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, who ran for president as a Democrat in 1976.

They took all three leadership positions in the Kansas house and introduced what they called a "Contract with Kansas," a solemn pledge to send more convicts to the chair while defending the fetus.

the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.

No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.

Great hopes make great men.

If you command wisely, you'll be obeyed cheerfully.

If thou are a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf.

If thou art a master, be sometimes blind if a servant, sometimes deaf.

'Tis skill, not strength, that governs a ship.

He that has one eye is a prince among those that have none.

it models the primary way in which the church comes to know God's will.

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind;

Remember this, I beseech you, all you boys who are getting into the upper forms. Now is the time in all your lives, probably, when you may have more wide influence for good or evil on the society you live in than you ever can have again.

Anyone who takes a decided line in certain matters, is sure to lead all the rest.

You see, at Rugby I was rather a great man. There one had a share in the ruling of 300 boys, and a good deal of responsibility; but here one has only just to take care of oneself, and keep out of scrapes; and that's what I never could do.

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

In politics and in his personal life, Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man, but in one thing he was consistent: the wanted the best of everything, for himself and for his country.

Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.

A manager is an assistant to his men.

Once an organization loses its spirit of pioneering and rests on its early work, its progress stops.