Leadership Quotes

"A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t have to."

- Richard Branson

"The lion does not need the whole world to fear him, only those nearest where he roams."

- A.J Darkholme

"Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish"

- Sam Walton

"You must underwrite the honest mistakes of your subordinates if you wish to develop their initiative and experience."

- Gen. Bruce Clarke

"Good leaders organize and align people around what the team needs to do. Great leaders motivate and inspire people with why they’re doing it. That’s purpose. And that’s the key to achieving something truly transformational."

- Marilyn Hewson

"If people leave worship saying, ‘What an amazing preacher!’ we have failed. Instead we must long for them to say, ‘What a great God, and what a privilege it is to meet him in his Word, as we have just done.’ A good teacher clears the way, declares the way, and then gets out of the way."

- Alistair Begg

"If we lose the war in the air, we lose the war altogether… and we lose it quickly."

- Bernard Law Montgomery

"I had a sort of a motto, “No details, no paper, and no regrets.” No details-don’t go about setting machine guns on different sides of bushes. That is done a damn sight better by a platoon commander. Then, no paper. You cannot entirely do without paper, but you can get rid of quite a lot of it. Do not have people coming to you with huge files, telling you all about it. Make the man explain it; and if he cannot explain it, get somebody else who can. When I say “no regrets”, that is important. You do the best you can. You may have gotten it wrong; you may have lost a battle. You may even have lost a good many of your men’s lives which hurts more, but do not have regrets. Do not sit in the corner and say, “Oh, If I had only gone to the left instead of the right,” or “If I had only fought in front of the river instead of behind it.” You have done the best you could-it hasn’t come off. All right! What’s the next problem? Get on to that. Do not sit in the corner weeping about what you might have done. No details, no paper, no regrets."

- Field Marshal Sir Bill Slim

"Management is nothing more than motivating other people."

- Lee Iacocca

"The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important."

- Sam Altwoman

"It is better to be feared than to be loved, if you cannot be both."

- Niccolo Machiavelli

"If a person is drowning, they must be rescued regardless of their religion or nationality."

- Irena Sendler

"You manage things; you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington."

- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

"You don’t lead by hitting people over the head—that’s assault, not leadership."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Always do everything you ask of those you command."

- General George S. Patton

"I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but by how high he bounces when he hits bottom."

- General George S. Patton

"Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory."

- General George S. Patton

"All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters either. Every single man in this Army play a vital role. Don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. Every man has a job to do and he must do it. Every man is a vital link in the great chain."

- General George S. Patton

"If you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do… the body is never tired if the mind is not tired."

- General George S. Patton

"There is only one tactical principle which is not subject to change. It is to use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wound, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time."

- General George S. Patton

"What makes life in Indian organizations difficult is the widespread prevalence of this very contemptuous pride. It stops us from listening to our juniors, subordinates and people down the line. You cannot expect a person to deliver results if you humiliate him, nor can you expect him to be creative if you abuse him or despise him. The line between firmness and harshness, between strong leadership and bullying, between discipline and vindictiveness is very fine, but it has to be drawn."

- A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

"There are times where it is necessary for a captain to give the appearance of confidence."

- Jean-Luc Picard

"Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do."

- Max de Pree

"When things go wrong in your command, start searching for the reason in increasingly larger concentric circles around your own desk."

- Gen. Bruce Clarke

"You must be able to underwrite the honest mistakes of your subordinates if you wish to develop their initiative and experience."

- Gen. Bruce Clarke

"Rank is given you to enable you to better serve those above and below you It is not given for you to practice your idiosyncrasies."

- Gen. Bruce Clarke

"Regardless of age or grade, soldiers should be treated as mature individuals They are men engaged in an honorable profession and deserve to be treated as such."

- Gen. Bruce Clarke

"This quote, while not explicitly about leadership, carries valuable implications for leaders. It warns against complacency and inaction in the face of wrongdoing. In a leadership context, King’s words could be interpreted as a call to speak up against unethical practices/ poor treatment of team members, even if it means challenging the status quo or going against the majority."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.