Inspirational Quotes - Leadership At Its Best

In this section we thought it would be important to share with you some quotes of Great men and women who were/are leaders during their time. Some you may know and many you might not have ever heard of.

As you continue in this process of developing your leadership skills, some of these quotes may be just that little inspiration that you need to keep going. So take an opportunity to read the quotes and if you have a favorite one that is not listed send it to us and we will make every effort to list it in this QUOTES section.

Leadership At Its Best, enjoy the quotes. Read On . . .

• There is a use for almost everything.
  Dr George Washington Carver

• You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him
  Brooker T. Washington

• The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line
  W. E. B. Du Boss

• Without training, they lacked knowledge.
  With our knowledge, they lacked confidence.
  With our confidence, they lacked victory.
  Julius Caesar

• Getting good player is easy. Getting them to play together is the hard part.
  Casey Stengel

• Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash
  Harriet Rubin

• Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy, is the noise before defeat.
  Sun Tzu

• No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
  Booker T Washington

• I for one believe that if you give people a thought understanding of what confronts them and the basic cause that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.
  Malcolm X

• You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.
  Eldridge Cleaver

• The challenge is to become part of the struggle, to make a positive difference.
  David Satcher

• It is time for every one of us to roll up our sleeves and put ourselves at the top of our commitment list.
  Marian Wright Edelman

• You give me the right people, and I don’t much care what organization you give me. Good thing will happen. Give the wrong people, and it doesn’t matter what you do with the organization. Bad things will happen.
  Colin Powell

• We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
  Benjamin Franklin

• When it comes to the cause of justice, I take on prisoners and I don’t believe in compromising.
  Mary Frances Berry

• Power never takes a back seat – only in the face of more power
  Malcolm X

• Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
  Frederick Douglas

• Children have never been very good at listing to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
  James Baldwin

• Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
  John F Kennedy

• I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
  Bishop Desmond Tutu

• Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
  Dwight D Eisenhower

• Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure thing boat never gets far from shore.
  Dale Carnegie

• The final test of a leader is that they leave behind them in other people the conviction and the will to carry on.
  Walter Lippmann

• To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.
  Thurgood Marshall

• The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with.
  Eleanor Holmes Norton

• Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars on poverty are fought to map changes.
  Muhammad Ali

• The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
  W. E. B. DuBoss

• If a man hasn’t discovered something that he is will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
  Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Leaders who win the respect of others are the ones who deliver more that they promise, not the ones who promise more than they can deliver.
  Mark A Clement

• A boat doesn’t go forward if each one is rowing their own way.
  Swahili proverb

• Exceptional leaders cultivate the Merlin-like habit of acting in the present moment as ambassadors of a radically different future, in order to imbue their organizations with a breakthrough vision of what it is possible to achieve.
  Charles E Smith

• To lead the people, walk behind them.
  Lao Tzu

• Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching, but also without attempting to play God.
  Henry Kissinger

• The real problem is not the bad guys; it is that good guys have gone to sleep.
  Maynard Jackson

• If you’re going to play the game properly, you’d better know every rule.
  Barbara Jordan

• We must all learn to live together as Brothers. Or we will all perish together as fools.
  Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Either we must attain freedom for the whole world of there will be no world left for any of us.
  Walter White

• If you’re afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
  James Baldwin

• The individual activity of one man with backbone will do more than a thousand men with a mere wishbone
  William J H Boetcker

• I not only use all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow.
  Woodrow Wilson

• The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
  Ralph Nader

• Leaders deal in hope.
  Napoleon

• No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
  Alice Walker

• If you don’t know where you come from, it’s difficult to determine where you are. It’s even more difficult to plan where you are going.
  Joseph Lowery

• We’ve got to have a legacy of leadership. We’ve got to bring along with us a generation of black women who are going to confront twenty-first-century realities.
  Jewell Jackson McCabe

• A good leader is not the person who does things right, but the person who finds the right things to do.
  Anthony S Dadovano

• We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.
  Jimmy Carter

• Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
  Sam Walton

• Thoughts have power. Thoughts are energy. And you can make your world or break your world by your thinking.
  Susan L. Taylor

• Leadership is about solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care.Either case is a failure of leadership.
  Colin Powell