Quotes About Leadership

John Adams had foreseen how central the president would be in American life. "His person, countenance, character, and actions, are made the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people," Adams wrote in 1790.

The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.

That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

Douglass understood history and the men who made it. Perfection was impossible; greatness was reserved for those who managed to move forward in an imperfect world:

The trust that Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.

I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault'—not 'leadership.'… I'll tell you what leadership is. It's persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. It's long, slow, tough work. That's the only kind of leadership I know—or believe in—or will practice.

Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion.

you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault'—not 'leadership.'… I'll tell you what leadership is. It's persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. It's long, slow, tough work.

The task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.

In his closing remarks, King spoke from a mountaintop, a prophet bringing word from on high. Lewis spoke more simply, from the valley, among the people whose burdens he knew because they were his burdens too.

Yet Lincoln could not rest. He could not stop. He ran the race. He could do no other.

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.

Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.

the people are intelligent, the people are just, and in time these characteristics must have an effect on their Representatives.

Leadership, Jefferson was learning, meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.

His larger argument was that a president should not simply defer to the will and wishes of the Congress or the judiciary. Instead, Jackson was saying, the president ought to take his own stand on important issues, giving voice as best he could to the interests of the people at large.

was to shape them in her image: courageous, competitive, caring, and tireless.

For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.32 (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.)

The moment illuminates the political Jefferson—a man who got his way quietly but unmistakably, without bluster or bombast, his words congenial but his will unwavering.

philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

he wanted to win. Republicans in the Texas of 1963–64 were Goldwater men, not Rockefeller men. So George Bush was a Goldwater man.

to Congress for

Lincoln said that he believed "the legitimate object of government is 'to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.'

It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.