Quotes About Leadership

What is the government? Nothing, unless supported by opinion.

If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.... I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

I make my battle plans from the spirit of my sleeping soldiers

Never depend on the multitude, full of instability and whims; always take precautions against it.

He who cannot look over a battlefield with a dry eye, causes the death of many men uselessly.

Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.

You don't govern men who don't have religion, you shoot them.

A general must be a charlatan.

A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root.

A great reserve and severity of manners are necessary for the command of those who are older than ourselves.

More glorious to merit a sceptre than to possess one.

A commander in chief ought to say to himself several times a day: If the enemy should appear on my front, on my right, on my left, what would I do? And if the question finds him uncertain, he is not well placed, he is not as he should be, and he should remedy it.

The nature of strategy consists of always having, even with a weaker army, more forces at the point of attack or at the point where one is being attacked than the enemy.

What is a throne? — a bit of wood gilded and covered in velvet. I am the state— I alone am here the representative of the people. Even if I had done wrong you should not have reproached me in public—people wash their dirty linen at home. France has more need of me than I of France.

The most difficult art is not in the choice of men, but in giving to the men chosen the highest service of which they are capable.

It is not that addresses at the opening of a battle make the soldiers brave. The old veterans scarcely hear them, and recruits forget them at the first boom of the cannon. Their usefulness lies in their effect on the course of the campaign, in neutralizing rumors and false reports, in maintaining a good spirit in the camp, and in furnishing matter for camp-fire talk. The printed order of the day should fulfill these different ends.

Under a good administration, the Nile gains on the desert. Under a bad one, the desert gains on the Nile.

You wish to sail a ship up stream by lighting a fire under its decks, I have no time for such nonsense.

Well then, I will tell you. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him...

Napoléon ubicumque felix.

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.

Posterity will talk of Washington as the founder of a great empire, when my name shall be lost in the vortex of revolution.

The man fitted for affairs and authority never considers individuals, but things and their consequences.