Top 100 Leadership Power Quotes
#1. Innovation happens when people are given the freedom to ask questions and the resources and power to find the answers.
Richard Branson
#2. ... The political leader must constantly appraise and reappraise the means through which 'he can hope to do justice to the responsibility that power imposes upon him' while at the same time pursuing political values with conviction.
Nicholas Gane
#3. No amount of training in leadership skills, courses in management methods, power titles, promotions, or associations can substitute for the right attitudes.
Myles Munroe
#4. The essence of power is the knowledge that what you do is going to have an effect not just an immediate but perhaps a lifelong effect on the happiness and wellbeing of millions of people and so I think the essence of power is to be conscious of what it can mean for others.
Bob Hawke
#5. Real leadership is not about prestige, power, or status. It is about responsibility.
Robert L. Joss
#6. One common behavior of late Stage 3 [in the process of a company's decline] is when those in power blame other people or external factors- or otherwise explain away the data- rather than confront the frightening reality that the enterprise may be in serious trouble.
Susan Collins
#7. Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#8. You have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.
Major Owens
#9. They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.
Ray Bradbury
#10. The past doesn't equal the future.
All great leaders, all people who have achieved in any area of life,
know the power of continuously pursuing their vision,
even if all the details of how to achieve it aren't yet available
Tony Robbins
#11. To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.
Victor Hugo
#12. It's such a rarity to have women in senior powerful positions. We can name them all. Fact is, women can handle power and handle it well. That's something I'd like a lot more women to understand.
Christine Nixon
#13. Mankind's history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual. Men are attracted by spirit. By power, men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power, anxieties are created.
Malcolm X
#14. If you want to be drunk, become drunk with an idea. If you want pleasure, have pleasure from the pursuit of your passion. If you want to be indoctrinated, then be so by the natural law of humanism.
Abhijit Naskar
#15. More and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.
Virginia Woolf
#16. Our power lies in our small daily choices, one after another, to create eternal ripples of a life well lived.
Mollie Marti
#17. It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.
J.K. Rowling
#18. Be a leader who is driven by purpose but not by position or power.
Debasish Mridha
#19. You have to enable and empower people to make decisions independent of you. As I've learned, each person on a team is an extension of your leadership; if they feel empowered by you they will magnify your power to lead.
Tom Ridge
#20. Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others.
John C. Maxwell
#21. The advantage of a permanent emergency for the executive is that even trivial things can routinely be accomplished by the crisis presidency. If everything is an emergency, all power is emergency power.
Garry Wills
#22. Words have power. Use the language of leadership versus the vocabulary of a victim.
Robin Sharma
#23. If American misjudgments and actions that evolved into human tragedies - i.e., racism, sexism, and other bigotries - are guiding lights, the Chinese leadership must ultimately yield its power to the sovereignty of its people.
Patrick Mendis
#24. This is women's moment to shift the tectonic plates of power on both the personal life and the leadership levels.
Gloria Feldt
#25. The true meaning of life lies in learning. When you learn, you understand the things better, when you understand the things better, it reflects in your actions, and when your actions are right, according to the process of life, you are bound to receive the desired result.
Roshan Sharma
#26. The leader is one who can organize the experience of the group ... and thus get the full power of the group. The leader makes the team. This is pre-eminently the leadership quality - the ability to organize all the forces there are in an enterprise and make them serve a common purpose.
Mary Parker Follett
#27. Leadership, in short, is power governed by principle, directed toward raising people to their highest levels of personal motive and social morality,
James MacGregor Burns
#28. Power isn't control at all - power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn't someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own.
Beth Revis
#29. The power is detested, and miserable the life, of him who wishes to be feared rather than to be loved.
Cornelius Nepos
#30. The end point of leadership is not just the position of power we reach, but the continual change and deepening we experience that makes a difference in our lives, our work, our world. Our leadership journeys are only at midpoint when we have achieved a position of power.
Janet Hagberg
#31. One biographer said Kennedy lived along the line where charm became power.
Scott Farris
#32. A mission without action is equally ineffective and futile as action without mission. Use the "power of precision," and remember language shapes thought and thought shapes action.
Archibald Marwizi
#33. Part of the task of the leader is to make others participate in his leadership. The best leader knows how to make his followers actually feel power themselves, not merely acknowledge his power.
Mary Parker Follett
#34. My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have.
Theodore Roosevelt
#35. What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.
June Jordan
#36. When we aren't curious in conversations we judge, tell, blame and even shame, often without even knowing it, which leads to conflict."
-The Power Of Curiosity: How To Have Real Conversations That Create Collaboration, Innovation and Understanding
Kirsten Siggins
#37. A vision we give to others of who and what they could become has power when it echoes what the spirit has already spoken into their souls.
Larry Crabb
#40. America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#41. Leadership is not about power. It's not about control; it's about helping people live according to the vision.
Kenneth H. Blanchard
#42. Leadership requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people.
Abraham Zaleznik
#43. Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.
Tom DeMarco
#44. I emphasize self-esteem, self-confidence, and dignity, not as an ideal, but as a real test of community organization. Without leadership development, community organizations do not have staying power.
Paul Wellstone
#45. The time is now, the person is you; better your life and become a name to conjure with in this day and age.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
#46. They've made the mistake of thinking that power over others and leadership are the same thing.
Tim Tharp
#47. A true leader does not derive power from his position, but from his ethics, from people's love for him, and from his knowledge, education and excellence in his field of work.
Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum
#48. True Leadership is the authority given by the trust of the followers to use power for the benefit of all.
Myles Munroe
#49. Love without power is ghostly, but power without love is deadly
Dianne Astle
#50. The business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line, hungry. And, so they started to see a lot of that and there was, that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners, you know, it was like a power struggle.
Richard Grimes
#51. Mindfulness gives us the power to understand our deep connection with the trees, flowers, stars, sun and the moon.
Amit Ray
#52. It is not our place to decide who should lead the Iraqi people. If Saddam [Hussein] leaves or has to be forced out of power and a new regime brought in, a new leadership brought in, I am confident it will be some combination of people inside the country and outside the country.
Colin Powell
#53. Leadership that exploits and sacrifices young people on the altar of its goals is nothing more than raw, demonic power. Genuine leadership is found in ceaseless efforts to foster young people, to pave the way forward for them.
Daisaku Ikeda
#54. The fact that companies are getting into building power plants that collect their own CO2 on-site shows there's some leadership in that industry. Some industries have seen the writing on the wall: that carbon will have to be managed.
Klaus Lackner
#55. All great leaders find a sense of balance through their levels of reception. For instance, those who support a leader may soften him, those who ignore him may challenge him, and those who oppose him may stroke his ego.
Criss Jami
#56. Who you are when you have no power to say anything, and who you become when you have power to say everything will determine whether you are a leader or not.
Israelmore Ayivor
#57. No one sits, as you do, so close to a king, who does not begin to grasp how the levers of power work, and the cost of the oil that must grease them.
Geraldine Brooks
#58. I've always been about the power of a woman - accentuating the positive, deleting the negative, whether you're talking her body, her voice or her leadership.
Donna Karan
#59. In a world of complex threats, our security and leadership depends on all elements of our power - including strong and principled diplomacy.
Barack Obama
#60. People of the hundred," he said, using an ancient Herrani phrase Arin was surprised he knew, "who leads you?"
So many cried Arin's name that it no longer sounded like his name.
Marie Rutkoski
#61. Every leader attracts a different type of follower from the left or the right, from the lowest or the highest class. Every leader unwittingly attracts certain stereotypes that fuel their underlying agenda.
Anita B. Sulser PhD
#62. Loving money at the expense of others is an abuse of power to get wealth.
Myles Munroe
#63. The [chief] characteristic of Hitler's leadership [was] his over-estimation of the power of the will. [To win the war] this will had only to be translated into faith down to the youngest private soldier.
Erich Von Manstein
#64. The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.
Vaclav Havel
#65. Sometimes servant leaders focus on the servitude part and forget the leader part. Great leadership isn't about abdication of power, it about the benevolent application of that power.
Scott Hammerle
#66. Leaders goal: Understand the power of serving a leader further down the road than you because leadership is contagious.
Brian Houston
#68. Under my leadership the Liberal Democrats would not be making polite interjections from the sidelines, we would be hammering on the doors of power.
Menzies Campbell
#69. The word "influence" means the power to change or affect someone.
Johnny Hunt
#70. There are times when we RISE up to situations and recognise our INNER POWER,STRENTHS and CAPABILITY by the way we handled a siutation ! How about recognising ourselves,our POWER. our TALENT, our CAPABILITIES and then handle each situation from our BEST levels. The RESULTS are bound to be UP'd!
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#71. 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.
Yitzhak Shamir
#72. Come forward as servants of Islam, organize the people economically, socially, educationally and politically and I am sure that you will be a power that will be accepted by everybody.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
#73. Competition and rivalry between the members of a group are the antithesis of the cooperation and team play needed in an effective management group. This is why team building is an empty abstraction for a group whose leader controls with power.
Thomas Gordon
#74. Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.
Pope Francis
#77. Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.
George Friedman
#78. The male-dominated systems know they cannot maintain their current power structures if and when the woman is restored to her natural and powerful state as a great leader and co-creator.
Bryant McGill
#79. When we throw ourselves off the power seat and allow Jesus to fill our soul, heart and mind - our whole life - with His leadership, the troubling, painful and fearful circumstances of our life lose their power over us.
Lynn Donovan
#80. As someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with most of the 20th century presidents, I have often thought that their accomplishments have little staying power in shaping popular views of their leadership.
Robert Dallek
#81. True leadership is when you are willing to risk your power and voice so that all of ours can be heard.
Justin Timberlake
#83. Passion gives power while attitude designs excellence! You can do it because you have the passion; you can do it very well because you have the right attitude!
Israelmore Ayivor
#84. Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#85. The conversation people need to have is no longer about women assuming positions of leadership within the existing power structure, it's about the power structures themselves, it's about how to go about assuming power, how to change the structures.
Elizabeth Lesser
#86. Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#87. Hatred is the price that society extracts from its leaders for the honour, power and wealth it bestows unto them.
Awdhesh Singh
#89. We must recognize that as the dominant power in the world we have a special responsibility. In addition to protecting our national interests, we must take the leadership in protecting the common interests of humanity.
George Soros
#90. I am afraid, I cannot and will not 'surrender' to Orthodoxy!!
My life in itself is an 'Epic experiment' of nature and new living!!
And I am living the 'Great Adventure'..this moment..NOW!!
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#91. Your past is handing you a tool you can use to leap into your future: the crucible moments from your own life. The power you need is in looking back to look forward.
Bill Jensen
#92. Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.
Alexander McCall Smith
#93. The only point of having power it seems to me is to empower others. The only point of leadership is to inspire.
Eve Ensler
#94. Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
Warren G. Bennis
#95. Your UNconscious mind has more power, influence and control over your thoughts, feelings, decisions, and choices, than your conscious mind.
Tony Dovale
#96. True leadership is not defined by notoriety, power, prestige, status, or job title...
Angie Morgan
#97. We must remind our politicians that we expect them to speak honestly and to be concerned about real issues, and not simply with the obtaining or retaining of power.
Davis McCaughey
#98. The real leader holds the power, not just the position.
John C. Maxwell
#100. Leadership is influence. It is the ability to obtain followers. When the leader lacks confidence, the followers have no commitment. A leader is great not because of his power, but because of his ability to empower others.
John C. Maxwell
