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.



James Kouzes and Barry Posner:
[Y]ou must unite your constituents around a common cause and connect with them as human beings.



James MacGregor Burns:
Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.



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.



Jesse Jackson:
Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.



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



John Gardner:
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.



Joseph Rost:
In leadership writ large, mutually agreed upon purposes help people achieve consensus, assume responsibility, work for the common good, and build community.



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.



Noam Chomsky:
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.



Peter Drucker:
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.



Peter Drucker:
What is the manager's 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.