Leadership Quotes

"In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better."

- Harry S. Truman

"I think one of the keys to leadership is recognizing that everybody has gifts and talents. A good leader will learn how to harness those gifts toward the same goal."

- Ben Carson

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

- Gen. George S. Patton

"If you want your people to think don't give instructions, give intent."

- David Marquet

"It takes leaders to grow other leaders."

- Ray Blunt

"The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership."

- Harvey S. Firestone

"All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual."

- Albert Einstein

"No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective."

- Peter Drucker

"We do not need sponsorship from above to do the right thing. All we really need from bosses is tolerance or indifference."

- Peter Block

"The...thing you can do to make your agency a more interesting place to work and consequently less bureaucratic is to enable those under you to feel they control their own areas of work."

- Kenneth Ashworth

"I don't want an organization of order-takers because order-takers don't take responsibility for results."

- Mike Abrashoff

"Many people believe that decentralization means loss of control. That's simply not true."

- General Bill Creech

"Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power."

- Henry George

"You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life."

"If ‘leadership’ has come to be known as something much bigger than us, aligned to changing the world, then we are spending way too much time celebrating things that hardly anyone can do and not celebrating things we can do every day."

"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership."

"A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind."

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there."

"The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes."

"Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well."

"Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas?"

"You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

"To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence … When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’"

"I learned that things are never as complicated as we imagine them to be. It is only our arrogance which seeks to find complicated answers to simple problems."

"Don’t find fault, find a remedy."

"To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful."

"I would rather get it right than be right."