Famous Leadership Quotes

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. – Harold R. McAlindon

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

There go the people. I must follow them for I am their leader. – Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

What chance gathers she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together. – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him. – General Douglas MacArthur

The real leader has no need to lead– he is content to point the way. – Henry Miller

Go to the people. Learn from them. Live with them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. The best of leaders when the job is done, when the task is accomplished, the people will say we have done it ourselves. – Lao Tzu

A leader is a dealer in hope. – Napoleon Bonaparte

Rely on your own strength of body and soul. Take for your star self-reliance, faith, honesty and industry. Don’t take too much advice — keep at the helm and steer your own ship, and remember that the great art of commanding is to take a fair share of the work. Fire above the mark you intend to hit. Energy, invincible determination with the right motive, are the levers that move the world. – Noah Porter

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. – John Quincy Adams

He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander. – Aristotle

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. – Martin Luther King, Jr. (from Christian Leadership World)

Any one can hold the helm when the sea is calm. – Publilius Syrus

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

Where there is no vision, the people perish. – Proverb

Misfortunes, untoward events, lay open, disclose the skill of a general, while success conceals his weakness, his weak points. –Horace

In this world a man must either be an anvil or hammer. – Henry W. Longfellow

I light my candle from their torches. – Robert Burton

Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. – Woodrow Wilson

The greater a man is in power above others, the more he ought to excel them in virtue. None ought to govern who is not better than the governed. – Publius Syrus

A bold onset is half the battle. – Giuseppe Garibaldi

The power is detested, and miserable the life, of him who wishes to be feared rather than to be loved. – Cornelius Nepos

To be a great leader and so always master of the situation, one must of necessity have been a great thinker in action. An eagle was never yet hatched from a goose’s egg. – James Thomas

Ill can he rule the great that cannot reach the small. – Edmund Spenser

He who has learned how to obey will know how to command. – Solon

When I give a minister an order, I leave it to him to find the means to carry it out. – Napoleon Bonaparte

No man can stand on top because he is put there. – H. H. Vreeland

A ruler should be slow to punish and swift to reward. – Ovid

It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy. – Seneca

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. – Abraham Lincoln

What you cannot enforce do not command. – Sophocles

No general can fight his battles alone. He must depend upon his lieutenants, and his success depends upon his ability to select the right man for the right place. – Philip Armour

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult. – Friedrich Nietzsche

It is absurd that a man should rule others, who cannot rule himself. (Absurdum est ut alios regat, qui seipsum regere nescit.) – Latin Proverb

Let him who would be moved to convince others, be first moved to convince himself. – Thomas Carlyle

A good general not only sees the way to victory; he also knows when victory is impossible. – Polybius