quotations about leadership
The first act of leadership is coming to grips with yourself, who you are, where you are, and what is of value to you, and shaping yourself by acts of conscious will into what you want to become.
FENWICK W. ENGLISH
The Art of Educational Leadership
He who thinketh he leadeth and hath no one following him is only taking a walk.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Leading from the Lockers
Leadership is the name that people use to make sense out of complex events and the outcomes of events they otherwise would not be able to explain. In other words, people attribute leadership to certain individuals who are called leaders because people want to believe that leaders cause things to happen rather than have to explain causality by understanding complex social forces or analyzing the dynamic interaction among people, events, and environment.
JOSEPH CLARENCE ROST
Leadership for the Twenty-first Century
Leadership is not the private reserve of a few charismatic men and women. It is a process ordinary people use when they are bringing forth the best from themselves and others. When the leader in everyone is liberated extraordinary things happen.
JAMES M. KOUZES & BARRY Z. POSNER
The Leadership Challenge
Because our desire for a coherent vision of the world is bottomless, our hunger for leadership is insatiable, too. Leaders make the world more sensible, but never sensible enough.
JOSHUA ROTHMAN
"Shut Up and Sit Down", The New Yorker, February 29, 2016
Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them through ... such is the basic method of leadership.
MAO ZEDONG
"Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership", Jun. 1, 1943
In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.
SHERYL SANDBERG
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Essential Lippmann
You know you're a good leader when people follow you out of curiosity.
COLIN POWELL
"10 Leadership Tenets from Colin Powell", Stanford Graduate School of Business
Leadership in today's world requires far more than a large stock of gunboats and a hard fist at the conference table.
HUBERT H. HUMPHREY
speech in Gainesville, Florida, Oct. 20, 1966
The right man comes at the right time.
ITALIAN PROVERB
That's what leadership is all about, identifying quality people, giving them the opportunity and experience to create and develop to continue to make the company successful. The best leaders identify and mentor potential leaders. A leader's most important legacy is the leaders he or she develops.
KENNETH E. STRONG & JOHN A. DICICCO
Leadership Is a Choice
What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong.
LORD MELBOURNE
attributed, Lord M.
The most important quality in a leader is that of being acknowledged as such.
ANDRE MAUROIS
"The Art of Leadership", The Art of Living
The best leaders turn their followers into leaders, realizing that the journey ahead requires many guides.
JAMES M. KOUZES & BARRY Z. POSNER
A Leader's Legacy
True leadership cannot be awarded, appointed, or assigned. It comes only from influence, and that can't be mandated. It must be earned. The only thing a title can buy is a little time -- either to increase your level of influence with others or to erase it.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men.
STEPHEN KING
Under the Dome
Those who are successfully to lead their fellow-men, should have once possessed the nobler feelings. We have all known individuals whose magnanimity was not likely to be troublesome on any occasion; but then they betrayed their own interests by unwisely omitting the consideration, that such feelings might exist in the breasts of those whom they had to guide and govern: for they themselves cannot even remember the time when in their eyes justice appeared preferable to expediency, the happiness of others to self-interest, or the welfare of a State to the advancement of a party.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Good leadership is largely invisible.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune