Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Arthur Ward

We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.

Wilferd Peterson

The best leaders are very often the best listeners. They have an open mind. They are not interested in having their own way but in finding the best way.

Walter Lippmann

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.

Walter Lippmann

Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals.

Voltaire

The right of commanding is no longer an advantage transmitted by nature; like an inheritance, it is the fruit of labors, the price of courage.

William Feather

Next to doing a good job yourself, the greatest joy is having someone else do a first class job under your direction.

William Bratton

They really do feel under attack, rank-and-file officers and much of American police leadership, that they feel they're under attack from the federal government at the highest levels, so that's something we need to understand also, this sense of perception that becomes a reality.

Walter Russell

He who cultivates that quiet, unobtrusive ecstasy of inner joyousness can scale any heights and be a leader in his field, no matter what that field is.

Walter Scott

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

Walter Gropius

The mind is like an umbrella. Its most useful when open.

Walter Isaacson

Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.

Yitzhak Shamir

I believe that the will of the people is resolved by a strong leadership. Even in a democratic society, events depend on a strong leadership with a strong power of persuasion, and not on the opinion of the masses.

Yogi Berra

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Winston Churchill

I let the argument rip healthily between the departments. This is a very good way to finding out the truth.

Winston Churchill

Hasty work and premature decisions may lead to penalties out of all proportion to the issues immediately involved.

Winston Churchill

We must not lose our faculty to dare, particularly in dark days.

Winston Churchill

It is very easy to say that your opponents have been guilty of a breach of faith, but it is a great mistake to splash the paint about so freely that your words cease to have any real meaning and cease to carry any sense of affront even to those to whom they are applied and cease to bear any connection with any genuine feeling of indignation on the part of those on whose behalf they are spoken.

Winston Churchill

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right. That is the only way to deserve and to win the confidence of our great people in these days of trouble.

Winston Churchill

The is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has it exceptions.

Winston Churchill

Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time.

Winston Churchill

Never does a man portray his character more vividly than when proclaiming the character of another.

Winston Churchill

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.

Winston Churchill

I'm just preparing my impromptu remarks.

Winston Churchill

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

Winston Churchill

The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.

Winston Churchill

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

Winston Churchill

Nobody ever launched an attack without having misgivings beforehand, You ought to have misgivings before; but when the moment of action is come, the hour of misgivings is passed. It is often not possible to go backward from a course which has been adopted in war. A man must answer "Aye" or "No" to the great questions which are put, and by that decision he must be bound.

Winston Churchill

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hope soon to be swept away.

Winston Churchill

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Winston Churchill

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

William Safire

Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.

William S. Burroughs

The Nova Mob doesn't have motives, as we understand motives. "Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my mineral origin," as a leader of the Nova Mob, Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin, said on one occasion.

William S. Burroughs

We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse