exceptional leadership Quotes

Anyone can show exceptional leadership ability in easy times. When all's going to plan, anyone can be inspirational/excellent/innovative and strong. The real question is how do you show up when everything's falling apart?

I don't think there's ever been a president elected who, in this short period of time, has done what we've done.

A good leader for instance is somebody like Nelson Mandela. I do not have seen such people coming every generation, maybe every ten generations, every hundred generations. People who are miracle workers.

The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. ... It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.

Michelle Obama is Superwoman. What can't she do? That's why people love her. She can be on the Supreme Court and anywhere else she wants. She can be the president. She's history and she'll stay history because she is so amazingly smart and together.

Men of genius are not to be analysed by commonplace rules. The rest of us who have been or are leaders, more commonplace in our quality, will do well to remember two things. One is never to forget posterity when devising a policy. The other is never to think of posterity when making a speech.

I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.

This is no job for a UN committee. It needs the same kind of unwavering dedication and the kinds of people that got us the first nuclear submarine and the first man on the moon.

Genuine leadership comes from the quality of your vision and your ability to spark others to extraordinary performance.

Playing with Aaron Rodgers, every time I went into a game you always felt like no matter what happens, he was going to bail you out somehow. He was that kind of guy. He was one of the three or four guys you have in the league right now that no matter where you are or what’s going on in the game, you have a chance with him.

My personal view is that organisations have a capacity to throw up extraordinary leaders to suit the occasion.

We need supermen to rule us .... But alas there are no supermen.

Why be an average person? All the great achievements of history have been made by strong individuals who refused to consult statistics or to listen to those who could prove convincingly that what they wanted to do, and in fact ultimately did do, was completely impossible.

By the end of his career, he [Steve Jobs] has proven that he can do the impossible, and he has gathered probably the most loyal team of eight players of any business in America.

No more than a famous master can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the province of art. It is not mechanically trained but inborn by God's grace.

Leadership is the challenge to be something more than average.

I think that David Stern is probably the greatest commissioner that any sport has ever had in the history of this country.

When a great man has some one object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads.

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground.

Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

A lot of mythology arose after [Mahatma Gandhi] death. But the fact remains that he was an exceptional man, terribly intelligent, with tremendous intuition for people, and a great instinct for what was right.

The great characteristic of men of active genius is a sublime self-confidence, springing not from self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will.

David Cohen is without a doubt one of the best - if not the best - public servant I've ever encountered.

There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.

Uncommon men require no common trust; give him but scope and he will set the bounds.