Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and discipline . . . Reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness. Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness. Fixation on trust results in folly. Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence. Excessive discipline and sternness in command result in cruelty. When one has all five virtues together, each appropriate to its function, then one can be a leader.
— Sun Tzu
Intelligence
Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how they should change.
Leo Tolstoy
It’s amazing how many cares disappear when you decide not to be something, but to be someone.
Coco Chanel
The only real training for leadership is leadership.
Anthony Jay
Trustworthiness
We must become the change we want to see.
Mahatma Gandhi
A good leader can’t get too far ahead of his followers.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.
Douglas MacArthur
Humaneness
The man whose authority is recent is always stern.
Aeschylus
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
Plato
To lead people, walk beside them . . . As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate . . . When the best leader’s work is done the people say,
“We did it ourselves!”
Lao-tse
Courage
Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?
Robert Coles
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
Discipline
Mountaintops inspire leaders but valleys mature them.
Winston Churchill
All men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln
It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
