Good Leadership Quotes To Inspire
Good leadership quotes to inspire can help shape leaders and those they lead.
Here are some of the most famous and inspiring leadership quotes that can motivate you to become a better leader.
You will notice that these quotes can not only guide you to be a better leader but also a better follower.
Get inspiration from these quotes or share them with your friends and loved ones to make this world a better place.
Top Ten Quotes about Leadership
1.) Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
2.) Control is not leadership; management is not leadership; leadership is leadership. If you seek to lead, invest at least 50% of your time in leading yourself—your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 20% leading those with authority over you and 15% leading your peers.
Dee Hock
3.) The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.
Ronald Reagan
4.) Earn your leadership every day.
Michael Jordan
5.) The real leader has no need to lead; he is content to point the way.
Henry Miller
6.) A leader is a dealer in hope.
Napoleon Bonaparte
7.) 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
8.) Leadership is the capacity to transform vision into reality.
Warren G. Bennis
9.) Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy.
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf
10.) Great leaders genuinely care for and love the people they lead more than they love leading itself. Leadership without love degenerates into self-serving manipulation.
Rick Warren
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Having a Vision
11.) Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
Jack Welch
12.) The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
Walter Lippmann
13.) If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.
John Quincy Adams
14.) Leadership is the willingness to put oneself at risk.
John C. Maxwell
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15.) The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.
Theodore M. Hesburgh
16.) One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you.
Dennis A. Peer
17.) Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.
John C. Maxwell
18.) In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
Thomas Jefferson
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Be a Leader
19.) The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry Kissinger
20.) A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.
Jim Rohn
21.) Leaders touch a heart before they ask for a hand.
John C. Maxwell
22.) Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.
Tom Peters
23.) A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
Rosalynn Carter
24.) A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.
Max Lucado
25.) The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.
Tony Blair
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Quotations for Leaders
25.) Do not follow where the path may lead.
Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Harold R. McAlindon
26.) The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. And the superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
William Arthur Ward
27.) There go the people.
I must follow them, for I am their leader.
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin
28.) The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.
John Buchan
29.) Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
John F. Kennedy
30.) 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
31.) The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.
John Maxwell
32.) The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.
Kenneth Blanchard
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Notable Quotes on Leaders
33.) Leaders are creatures of their environment, but unlike most creatures, they are also movers of it. As movers of and within the organization, they push it forward, at the same time shaping it as much as it shapes them.
John Baldoni
34.) Leadership is action, not position.
Donald H. McGannon
35.) All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
John Kenneth Galbraith
36.) Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.
Robert Jarvik
37.) I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
Ralph Nader
38.) My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.
Steve Jobs
39.) As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Bill Gates
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Inspirational Leadership Quotes
40.) A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.
John Maxwell
41.) Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, and the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
Peter F. Drucker
42.) The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.
Harvey Firestone
43.) Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline and carrying it out.
Stephen Covey
44.) A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
45.) Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
46.) Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.
Sheryl Sandberg
Leadership Quotes: Being a Leader
47.) Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
48.) I like a leader who can, while pointing out a mistake, bring up the good things the other person has done. If you do that, then the person sees that you have a complete picture of him. There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated, even when you humiliate him rightly.
Nelson Mandela
49.) A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says I was beaten; he does not say My men were beaten.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
50.) Be gentle, and you can be bold; be frugal, and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others, and you can become a leader among men.
Lao Tzu
51.) Contrary to the opinion of many people, leaders are not born. Leaders are made, and they are made by effort and hard work.
Vince Lombardi (for more Vince Lombardi quotations)
52.) The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it.
Elaine Agather
53.) I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.
Alexander the Great
54.) Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.
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Success Leadership Quotes to Inspire
55.) No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
Peter Drucker
56.) Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.
General Colin Powell
57.) You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.
Anthony J. D’Angelo
58.) Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.
Reed Markham
59.) A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others see.
Leroy Eimes
60.) Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.
Seth Godin
61.) Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
62.) The supreme quality of leadership is integrity.
Dwight Eisenhower
63.) Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar.
Orrin Woodward
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Famous Leaders Quotes
64.) Don’t follow the crowd; let the crowd follow you.
Margaret Thatcher
65.) People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
President Theodore Roosevelt
66.) I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep.
Charles Maurice
67.) A leader has to appear consistent. That doesn’t mean he has to be consistent.
James Callahan
68.) Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.
Thomas J. Watson
69.) A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
70.) A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along, they are being directed from behind.
Nelson Mandela
71.) A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
Martin Luther King
72.) Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln
73.) Never has man reached his destination by persistence in deviation from the straight path.
Mahatma Gandhi
74.) If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are an excellent leader.
Dolly Parton
Short Leadership Quotes to Inspire
75.) Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Steve Jobs
76.) He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.
Aristotle
77.) What you do has far greater impact than what you say.
Stephen Covey
78.) Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems.
Brian Tracy
79.) The greatest leaders mobilize others by coalescing people around a shared vision.
Ken Blanchard
80.) I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?
Benjamin Disraeli
81.) The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.
Ray Kroc
82.) Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.
Bill Bradley
83.) The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.
Tony Blair
Best Leadership Sayings
84.) One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.
Arnold Glasow
85.) I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles, but today it means getting along with people.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
86.) Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Peter F. Drucker
87.) The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not a bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor but without folly.
Jim Rohn
88.) The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.
Max DePree
89.) Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily, even if you had no title or position.
Brian Tracy
90.) Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
Harry Truman
91.) True leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed… Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
92.) Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
Vince Lombardi
Closing Thoughts
A true leader is a symbol of success wherever they are. Leaders create a new path where there is none. They make things easier. They provide solutions to the most insurmountable challenges.
It is the greatest leader who has been pivotal in changing history at different times.
By Michael O’Halloran
Michael O’Halloran founded Greeting Card Poet in 2014 and has worked as its publisher and editor ever since. He has co-authored four books on kids’ trivia and four on coaching. Previously, Michael was the president of Magnetic Poetry. He has invented and brought over 75 new gift and toy products to market, most of which deal with wordplay. Mike is married and a father of four daughters.
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