Quotes About Leadership

The GOP, Truman said, was more interested in partisan advantage than in national security.

Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic.

If the President's theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion," Senator Pat Harrison, Democrat of Mississippi, remarked, "then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States.

Watergate is a shabby, tawdry business that demeans the Presidency. Am I failing to lead by not stating that?

Well, what the hell is the presidency for?" he asked, if not to do the big things lesser men might not?

Such was the Bush code: Strive for victory, but never seem self-involved

Experience teaches us that men who are equally wise and good may differ in political as well

And 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

the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment.

By closing our minds to the even remote possibility that a political leader with whom we nearly always disagree might have a point about a particular matter is to preemptively surrender the capacity of the mind to shape our public lives.

FDR had the gifts of self-knowledge and a compassion for the plight of others—saving graces that enabled him to become one of a handful of truly great and transformative presidents.

we hear another president, impossibly young and dashing, his breath white in the inaugural air, telling us to ask not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country.

In a twenty-first-century hour when the presidency has more in common with reality television or professional wrestling, it's useful to recall how the most consequential of our past presidents have unified and inspired with conscious dignity and conscientious efficiency.

The magnitude of the job dwarfs every man who aspires to it," Johnson recalled in his memoirs. "Every man who occupies the position has to strain to the utmost of his ability to fill it.

He seemed constantly impressed with the idea that, at the moment of his extinction, the noble fabric which he [sewed], must infallibly sink in ruins. For this, as in every other respect, the citizens of the United States are more fortunate than the Romans, as there is every reason to believe that the benefits of the present enlightened administration will extend to other generations." The

what mattered was what you did once in power, not what you said in order to get there.

He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people. When he speaks in his true character, he speaks for no special interest. If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its President is of such insight and caliber.

Washington. In Monroe's Cabinet, Secretary of

A confirmed free trader, Bush was committed to NAFTA

The form of government which prevails," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.

The Jefferson style – cultivate his elders, make himself pleasant to his contemporaries, and used his pen and his intellect to shape the debate – arm him well for the national arena.

And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country's finest hours lay ahead.

But they always stayed in the arena, grappling with each other and with Stalin to find a way to win. Had they failed, or truly fallen out with each other, we could be living in a different world.

His impulse," Winston Churchill had written of FDR in the mid-1930s, "is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land.