Quotes About Leadership

In number 71, Hamilton presented his theory of presidents as leaders who should act for the popular good, even if the people were sometimes deluded about their interests.

This is the true secret . . . that wherever a regiment is well officered, the men have behaved well—when otherwise, ill—the [misconduct] or cowardly behavior always originating with the officers, who have set the example.

By 1872, under Grant's leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.)

Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances:

Every president "ought to be personally responsible for his behaviour in office.

May we not justly say . . . that the liberty which Mr. Lincoln declared with his pen General Grant made effectual with his sword—by his skill in leading the Union armies to final victory?

old Abe is through with his next four years, we will put him [i.e., Grant]

Washington grew as a leader because he engaged in searching self- criticism. "I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors," he once wrote. "The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults or remove prejudices which are imbibed against him."41 The one thing Washington could not abide was when people published criticisms of him without first giving him a chance to respond privately

Months after leaving office, he wrote to the Bank of the United States and admitted that he did not know his account balance because he had lost his bank book—this from the man who had created the bank.

He recoiled at the cowardice and selfishness he saw rampant in the New York legislature. "The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people," he told Morris. "In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly." Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment.

How this seemingly dull, phlegmatic man, in a stupendous act of nation building, presided over the victorious Continental Army and forged the office of the presidency is a mystery to most Americans. Something essential about Washington has been lost to posterity, making him seem a worthy but plodding man who somehow stumbled into greatness.

In public exigencies, there is hardly anything more prejudicial than excessive caution, timidity and dilatoriness, as there is nothing more beneficial than vigour, enterprise and expedition.

John Adams summed up the case succinctly: "In general, our generals have been outgeneralled.

He generally spoke with much animation and energy, and with considerable gesture. His mind was filled with all the learning and precedence required for the occasion, enabling him to make numerous extemporaneous speeches. He seduced the listeners with hope and provoked them with fear, leading one spectator to comment that Hamilton's harangues combine the poignancy of vinegar with the smoothness of oil.

Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed.

Things seldom happened accidentally to George Washington, but he managed them with such consummate skill that they often seemed to happen accidentally. By 1775 he had a fine sense of power—how to gain it, how to keep it, how to wield it.

Neatly dressed and well groomed, Rockefeller was the first to arrive at and the last to leave work each day.

Since Coster's death the year before, Bacon knew he was in over his head and reeled under the responsibility. "My

Rockefeller tended to portray himself as a hard-driving executive who went as far as the law allowed but not an inch further.

To form a new government requires infinite care and unbounded attention, for if the foundation is badly laid, the superstructure must be bad.

He was the embodiment of power and purpose.

Since he never owned more than a third of his company, he needed the cooperation of other people.

Having created an empire of unfathomable complexity, he was smart enough to see that he had to submerge his identity in the organization.

With a second-string cabinet of Wolcott, Pickering, and McHenry, Washington had purged it of apostasy but had also exchanged creative ferment for mediocrity; the numerous rejections had given him little choice.