Quotes About Political Leadership

#1. Too often, advances in civil rights or women's rights are undermined by wrong-headed legislation or weak-kneed political leadership.

Mike Quigley

#2. School boards can be a steppingstone to higher forms of political leadership.

Wendy Kopp

#3. Everybody in the world is capable of democratic development. Some people in the world are unlucky enough to get stuck with really bad political leadership and with really bad political institutions.

Condoleezza Rice

#4. Good political leadership for me involves getting the big decisions right - however difficult, however controversial, however potentially divisive - and then being able to take people with you.

Charles Kennedy

#5. The true measure of a city is its soul. This is the restless energy that doesn't wait for political leadership.

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

#6. In some countries we have had the right to vote for less than 100 years, so the entry of women into political leadership has caused a tsunami.

Iveta Radicova

#7. It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#8. Where there is an absence of international political leadership, civil society should step in to fill the gap, providing the energy and vision needed to move the world in a new and better direction.

Daisaku Ikeda

#9. The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible poltical goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence ...

Michael Ignatieff

#10. We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.

Ralph Peters

#11. It is not a sensible or intelligent response for us in Europe to ridicule American argument or parody their political leadership.

Tony Blair

#12. Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

Arthur Miller

#13. I don't think one party has a bad vision over the other party. I have no doubts that every Indian and every Indian political leadership would like to see this country get to a much better level. We would all like to see inclusive growth.

Baba Kalyani

#14. We had a military and political leadership at that period which was genuinely deluded.

Neil Sheehan

#15. But the ability to articulate what you are doing, to be clear about it, and to stick to it is, I think, the essence of political leadership.

Chris Patten

#16. Pakistan's political leadership needs to make a clear choice to fight the Taliban decisively, not with half measures, the burden is on Prime Minister Sharif to show he can unite the country to defend its children.

Bruce Riedel

#17. I think leadership of any kind requires trust and transparency and voters should demand no less from their political leadership in government.

Carly Fiorina

#18. We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.

Margaret Mead

#19. The nation's chronic weakness is its political system, which is nearing dysfunction. If the U.S. can elect better political leadership, it should be able to manage problems better than most competitors.

David Ignatius

#20. There are certain skills that business people have that are - that are, in fact, helpful in - when it comes to being in political leadership.

Rick Santorum

#21. Detroit's political leadership is a parasite that has outgrown its host.

Kevin D. Williamson

#22. Among the many factors that make a return to halcyon days of the first decades of the postwar era virtually impossible is the decline of clearly defined political leadership.

Robert Gilpin

#23. The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

Michael Pollan

#24. There are some who are naturally fitted for philosophy and political leadership, while the rest should follow their lead and let philosophy alone.

Plato

#25. Not all civil servants admire strong political leadership. But if you want to change things for the better you need strong political leadership.

Harriet Harman

#26. My assessment is that we have a crisis in national political leadership. When will America recognize the danger we face? When will the corrosive partisanship of American politics end and allow for a bipartisan solution to arguably the most dangerous threat our nation has faced in over 60 years?

Ricardo Sanchez

#27. Having served in the Nixon Administration, I am well aware of how the political leadership of an administration can try to politicize the civil service, including law enforcement.

Frank Wolf

#28. Despite the increasingly presidential style of political leadership in our country, teamwork is essential.

Bob Ainsworth

#29. What we need is political leadership which can give guidance to the development of global governance. We need business leadership which goes beyond shareholder value to understand the needs and fears of other stakeholders and their communities.

Juan Somavia

#30. The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times.

Molly Ivins

#31. At that time, the army leadership said the implementation of this agreement would allow everyone, including the IRA, to take its political objectives forward by peaceful and democratic means.

Gerry Adams

#32. 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

#33. The country has sorted itself ideologically into the two political parties, and those partisan attachments have hardened in recent years. It will take an extraordinary event and act of leadership to break this partisan divide. I thought 9/11 might provide such an opportunity, but it was not seized.

Thomas E. Mann

#34. We have a natural constant craving for leadership. Democracy is always a fragile and imperfect achievement. Yet a distinct feeling of malaise in our political culture lingers. There is something missing from our public debates.

Tim Soutphommasane

#35. Comrade Deng Xiaoping - along with other party elders - gave the party leadership their firm and full support to put down the political disturbance using forceful measures.

Li Peng

#36. The Taliban has a huge leadership problem at a critical political moment, another caliph has announced himself to the world, and the Taliban has been silent. And that is getting noticed by militants across South Asia.

Graeme Smith

#37. What was wrong with communism wasn't aberrant leadership, it was communism.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#38. (Vice President) Garner has taken his personal smallness, his lack of generosity, and forged it into a political principle. He has no imagination, no convictions, and he substitutes political cynicism for social understanding.

Hamilton Basso

#39. Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

Dan Simmons

#40. As the prevailing voices in the public spotlight are predominantly men, stepping into the spotlight with the truth of who you are as a woman is political change.

Tabby Biddle

#41. Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. Far less ephemeral, however, is hope: the hope of future favors. Far less ephemeral is fear, the fear that in the future, favors may be denied.

Robert A. Caro

#42. Persistence in a single view has never been regarded as a merit in political leaders.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#43. I think leadership is knowing what you want to achieve and then purposefully and sensibly taking steps to achieve it, remembering always that you have got to bring people with you if you are seeking to be a successful political leader.

Tony Abbott

#44. Why would I be willing to challenge my Republican leadership? Because my allegiance will always be to the Constitution and the American people first and foremost, not to my political party.

Matt Salmon

#45. Self-promotion is a leadership and political skill that is critical to master in order to navigate the realities of the workplace and position you for success.

Bonnie Marcus

#46. True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home. The people of the world want change. They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history.

Barack Obama

#47. In modern political society it is probably a fact that national leadership can heighten foreign crises to the point where war becomes almost inevitable and public approval, at least for a time, automatic.

Arthur Ekirch

#48. I had discovered long ago the first lesson of political courage: to think anew. I had then learned the second: to be prepared to lead and to decide. I was now studying the third: how to take the calculated risk. I was going to alienate some people, like it or not. The moment you decide, you divide.

Tony Blair

#49. Leadership is a dynamic tension between where a politician thinks his country must go and where his voters want it to go.

Dick Morris

#50. John Hay indicates that dealing with people directly as a holder of political office "requires a stronger heart and a more obedient nervous system than I possess.

John Taliaferro

#51. The world needs heroes. Be a hero and build your part of the world.

Abhijit Naskar

#52. We choose our leaders, political or spiritual, out of our own confusion, and so they also are confused.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#53. Let the massacres remind us to turn down our political volume and venom.

Phillip Adams

#54. Democracy today, especially in the English-speaking world, is a political system that specialises in positioning inadequate, unqualified and dubious types in leadership positions.

Gilad Atzmon

#55. Americans will not and should not respond to a political creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present.

Nelson Rockefeller

#56. We're at the end of an era of failed leadership. We have been led by a divider [ Barack Obama] who has sliced and diced the electorate, pitting American against American for political purposes.

Rick Perry

#57. It is the first time in the history of Rwanda that political change in the highest leadership of the country has taken place in peace and security.

Paul Kagame

#58. The urgent need today is to develop and support leaders on every level of government who are independent of the bossism of every political machine - the big-city machine, the liberal Democrat machine, and the Republican kingmaker machine.

Phyllis Schlafly

#59. People more than ever since I can remember are concerned about being out of step and out of line with their political party and won't cross over. There is nobody, man or woman, who wants to be left out, and people are fearful of that. People are fearful of their leadership as well.

Gary Ackerman

#60. It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

Theodor Adorno

#61. Reaching a general understanding that sustainability is the ultimate issue will finally bring us face-to-face with the political challenge of forging a sustainable society during the next few decades. It is a challenge we can meet if we have the leadership and the political will to do so.

Gaylord Nelson

#62. Leadership on virtue can never come from the major political actors; it will have to come from a movement of people, such as the people of a town who come together and agree to create moral coherence across the many areas of children's lives.

Jonathan Haidt

#63. Washington's answer to a self-inflicted financial crisis reminded Americans why they so deeply distrust the political class. The 'fiscal cliff' process was secretive and sloppy, and the nation's so-called leadership lacked the political courage to address our root problems: joblessness and debt.

Ron Fournier

#64. "I've become a huge fan of term limits," the former aide said, "because Armey and the others in leadership used to be just like you and your crew in their approach to spending. They have changed over the years."

Mark Sanford

#65. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our Commander-in-Chief, what we heard today was a political broadside from our Campaigner-in-Chief.

Paul Ryan

#66. People fail to realize there's a difference in kinds of money. There is old money and there is new money. Old money has political power but new money has only purchasing power. (1963)

LIFE Magazine

#67. You don't die when your body stops functioning. You die when your name is uttered for the last time in the world.

Abhijit Naskar

#68. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a platform of 'ending welfare as we know it.' His political worldview, drawn from like-minded thinkers at the Democratic Leadership Council, was based in private sector growth and personal responsibility.

Nina Easton

#69. We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet.

Wynton Marsalis

#70. While JFK had made the sale on a political level, he had not yet completed it on an emotional one.

David Pietrusza

#71. Within this historic and optimistic future in mind, I have made no value judgment of the destiny bestowed on each nation. For all this, however, leadership matters; so do the institutional structures and the system of political governance.

Patrick Mendis

#72. Continuing to believe the same thing, even in the face of new evidence to the contrary, is the definition of insanity - except in politics where it's called leadership.

Scott Adams

#73. The British leadership has acknowledged that it only became possible to end the violence in North Ireland when it stopped thinking of the [Irish Republican Army] as "a terrorist organization" and began treating it as a political actor with genuine grievances that deserved to be addressed.

Richard A. Falk

#74. In the founding era of our country, it was not organized religion but personal faith that brought focus and unified the early leadership-maybe an unspoken faith in God, and certain values that came with that faith. So in that sense, we cannot discount, in my judgment, religious faith in politics.

Billy Graham

#75. The allocation of research money was a political act.

Tom Clancy

#76. I've never worried about payback. People are hungry for leadership that's not afraid of political consequence.

Wendy Davis

#77. ... 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

#78. Germany must be a country which generates political ideas and leadership, which is capable of compromise, which is sovereign and yet knows that it needs its partners on both sides of the Atlantic.

Horst Koehler

#79. The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead.

Edward L. Bernays

#80. There is something discordant about a team of speechwriters and political operatives hammering away to create an image of the 'real, inner' candidate. And, to be blunt, there is no necessary connection between a moving life experience and the skills necessary for leadership.

Jeff Greenfield

#81. Political judgment is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

Otto Von Bismarck

#82. Mexican leadership has been doing serious damage to the United States by out-negotiating our representatives and political leaders.

Donald Trump

#83. The trouble in modern democracy is that men do not approach to leadership until they have lost the de e to lead anyone.

William Beveridge

#84. Only a person who perceives that all human beings are important can become a great leader.

Auliq Ice

#85. The political Greeders mindset wastes resources that could transform the future of tens of millions of people and the destinies of the countries.
We need to rethink Leadership and politics.

Tony Dovale

#86. You are born to build the society, not to follow it.

Abhijit Naskar

#87. Through leadership of the fight against French colonialism, Ho Chi Minh had made a name for himself in the international political arena.

Nguyen Cao Ky

#88. Never accept the role of a Gladiator if you do not have the spirit of a Warrior.

A.K. Hasan

#89. The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz.

Gary Wolf

#90. Let the government not be an instructor but a parent who loves and adjusts to the needs of the nation, But remember a parent does what makes things look good to the entire family without segregation.

Auliq Ice

#91. Whether you are a business leader or political leader, you need people around you who are prepared to tell the truth.

Michael Kroger

#92. Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.

Charles Dickens

#93. They were following me because I was ahead of them, which is no way to choose a leader. Following someone simply because they're out in front is never a good idea, but it happens all the time.

Alan Huffman

#94. World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.

Neil Sheehan

#95. The Congress leadership always denied responsibilities to me both within the government and within the party organisation ... They would always tell me my image as a Hindu leader was a constraint on my capacity as a political leader.

Satpal Maharaj

#96. A sense of messianic purpose makes the national interest almost indistinguishable from the political interests of the president.

Ron Suskind

#97. JFK apparently felt genuine sympathy for his 1960 presidential opponent Richard Nixon. He felt that, with Nixon's frequent shifts in political philosophy and reinventions, he must have to decide which Nixon he will be at each stop. This, Kennedy reasoned, must be exhausting.

David Pietrusza

#98. In the history of political thinking, there has been always a polar conflict between ethical and the ruthless realistic thoughts of men in general where every greater thought brings in faster understanding yielding an exciting result so fast.

Auliq Ice

#99. For citizens to become fully engaged in holding their leadership to account, accurate information is required to see where action is needed, to measure the results of policies and programmes, to build support for courageous decisions and to consolidate political legitimacy.

Mo Ibrahim

#100. Well football teams are perhaps easier to control than political parties, I'm sure the Prime Minister would agree with me, but yeah I think every team needs discipline and a sense of self-belief and that's important, that's what leadership's all about.

Iain Duncan Smith