Favorite Leadership Quotations

We’re connoisseurs here of famous (and not-so-famous) quotations by people talking about leadership. Some of these are complimentary toward leaders–others are not.

Adlai Stevenson:
“It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.”

Albert Einstein:
“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”

Carl Sagan:
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“You do not lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.”

Edwin H. Friedman:
“Leadership can be thought of as a capacity to define oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future.”

Elizabeth Dole:
“What you always do before you make a decision is consult. The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted. Then, once policy is determined, you call on them to help you sell it.”

Eric Hoffer:
“In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Ernest Becker:
“It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.”

Eugene V. Debs:
“I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and mis-representatives of the masses — you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.”

Everett Dirksen:
“I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.”

H. Ross Perot:
“Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.”

Henrik Ibsen:
“A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.”

Herbert B. Swope:
“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.”

Isaac Newton:
“If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.”

James Callaghan:
“A leader must have the courage to act against an expert’s advice.”

James Kouzes and Barry Posner:
“There’s nothing more demoralizing than a leader who can’t clearly articulate why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

“You must unite your constituents around a common cause and connect with them as human beings.”

Jawaharlal Nehru:
“A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.”

John Gardner:
“Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.”

“Most important, leaders can conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty preoccupations and unite them in pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts.”

John Naisbitt:
“Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it.”

John Quincy Adams:
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

Kenneth Blanchard:
The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.

Margaret Chase Smith:
“Leadership is not manifested by coercion, even against the resented. Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any measures.”

Margaret J. Wheatley:
“When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi:
“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”

Peter Drucker:
“What is the managers job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite — and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.”

“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I.” And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I.” They don’t think “I.” They think “we”; they think “team.” They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but “we” gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”

“Leaders shouldn’t attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can’t compromise.”

Peter Senge:
“Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static “snapshots.” It is a set of general principles — distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management…. During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility — for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.”

Plato:
“A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.”

Ralph Nader:
“I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”

Robert Coles:
“Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?”

Robert Greenleaf:
“Good leaders must first become good servants.”

Robert Louis Stevenson:
“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.”

Rosabeth Moss Kantor:
“Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.”

Rosalynn Carter:
“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.”

Napoleon Bonaparte:
“A leader is a dealer in hope.”

Benjamin Disraeli:
“I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?”

Elaine Agather:
“The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it.”

Groucho Marx:
“Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men — the other 999 follow women.”

Theodore M. Hesburgh:
“The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.”

Theodore Roosevelt:
“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”

Ben Stein:
“The indispensable first step in getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.”

Scott Adams (Dilbert Cartoonist):
“For every manager learning how to be a better leader, there are 10 employees trying to figure out how to make it stop.”

Colette Bowe:
“No letters after your name are ever going to be a total guarantee of competence any more than they are a guarantee against fraud. Improving competence involves continuing professional development…That is the really crucial thing, not just passing an examination.”

James Baldwin:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Warren G. Bennis:
“Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.”

“Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.”

“Leaders keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line.”

“The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.”

Andrew Carnegie:
“No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.”

Winston Churchill:
“The price of greatness is responsibility.”

“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”

James Crook:
“The man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

John C. Maxwell:
“A big man is one who makes us feel bigger when we are with him.”

Lao Tzu:
“The leader is best,
When people are hardly aware of his existence,
Not so good when people praise his government,
Less good when people stand in fear,
Worst, when people are contemptuous.
Fail to honor people, and they will fail to honor you.
But of a good leader, who speaks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
The people say, ‘We did it ourselves.’”

Donald H. McGannon:
“Leadership is action, not position.”