Quotes About Leadership

Malicious or not, strong leaders always attract followers.

My mother was a voice of reason, a reminder that they had to stay focused and fully assess the situation. Her composure calmed everybody; her strong manner inspired them. This, I realized, was how a leader behaved.

Power," as John Adams had written, "always thinks it has a great soul.

Never before in the history of warfare have so few been commanded by so many.

MARKET GARDEN proved "an epic cock-up," as a British major averred, a poor plan with deficient intelligence, haphazard execution, and indifferent generalship

Brooke's deputy, General Sir John Kennedy, observed of Churchill: "He is difficult enough when things are going badly, more difficult when nothing is happening, and quite unmanageable when all is going well.

Had the generals seen the battlefield clearly, reclaiming Schmidt would have been the least of their concerns.

In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according

To his brother Edgar he confided, "I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.

I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.

As a battalion commander in France, it was said, he had once pulled a pistol on a hesitant junior officer and shot him in the buttocks. "There," Allen said. "You're out. You're wounded." Such gestures would be unnecessary here.

In a phone call one evening the corps commander grew incensed when Ward mentioned his good fortune in losing no officers in combat that day. "Goddammit, Ward, that's not fortunate. That's bad for the morale of the enlisted men," Patton snapped. "I want you to get more officers killed.

It was the indispensable institution, led by the indispensable man, and the coupling of a national army with its commander marked the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution. "Confusion and discord reigned in every department," Washington wrote in late July. "However we mend every day, and I flatter myself that in a little time we shall work up these raw materials into good stuff.

Discipline," Washington had written in 1757, "is the soul of an army." Certainly

Matthew Ridgway to command the XVIII Airborne Corps, Gavin had taken over the 82nd in mid-August. At thirty-seven he would be not only the youngest major general in the U.S. Army during World War II, but also the youngest division commander since the Civil War. That achievement was all the more remarkable given his start in life. Gavin was an orphan (he later concluded that his mother had been

Even Colonel Lang, watching the Americans from the other side of Djebel Naemia, had been surprised by their timid initial approach to the Maknassy heights; a more forceful attack, he concluded, could have shortened the Tunisian campaign by weeks. In his view, the Americans appeared reluctant to risk heavy casualties in a decisive battle, preferring to crush their foes with material superiority even if that meant extending the fight. There was truth in that assessment too.

A popular aphorism soon circulated among frontline troops: "Never were so few commanded by so many from so far." Asked why the Germans failed to bomb AFHQ headquarters, a cynical American major replied, "Because it's worth fifty divisions to them.

Known as Tiny to his troops, he had a skull the size of a medicine ball, with a pushbroom mustache and legs that extended like sycamore trunks from his khaki shorts.

De Gaulle reluctantly reboarded La Combattante, convinced that "France would live, for she was equal to her suffering," while privately wondering, "How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?

The cardinal principle of concentrating military force had been abandoned by George and his ministers; so, too, had the pursuit of clear strategic goals while avoiding diversionary sideshows.

the prime minister's physician concluded that "Monty wants to be a king." Eisenhower came to believe that "Monty is a good man to serve under, a difficult man to serve with, and an impossible man to serve over." That maxim would tidily sum up the Allied high command in Europe.

German general who had fought in both world wars now described the Normandy struggle as "a monstrous blood-mill, the likes of which I have not seen in eleven years of war." Omar Bradley lamented, "I can't afford to stay here. I lose all my best boys. They're the ones who stick their heads through hedges and then have them blown off.

Rick Atkinson

The balance of the campaign—indeed, the balance of the war—would require learning not only how to fight but how to rule.