Misguided Leadership Quotes

’Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.

The will of the nation" is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age.

If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.

I think that Peter Mandelson, particularly in relation to the issue of policing, made a huge mess of it. He allowed himself to be manipulated by the securocrats within the British establishment.

The arrogance of those in charge of the Pentagon and in Baghdad was as limitless as their ignorance …

Hubspot's leaders were not heroes but rather a pack of sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformation technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that still has never turned a profit.

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as running mate is the towering example of his poor judgment. Palin's ignorance of public affairs is monumental.

The Iraq war was always a long shot. But it was made immeasurably longer by its principal architects in Washington, including Douglas Feith, who ignored expert advice, reserved most of their effort for fighting each other in ideological battles, and regarded the Iraqi people as an afterthought.

For a President not to have confidence in, not to be prepared to listen to the myriad of intelligence agencies from defense intelligence, to the CIA, etcetera, is absolutely mindless. It's just mindless.

Conflict, of course, comes about because of the misuse of power and the clash of ideals, not to mention the inflammatory activities of unscrupulous and bigoted leaders. But it also arises, tragically, from an inability to understand and from the powerful emotions which, out of misunderstanding, lead to distrust and fear.

It is a tragedy indeed that new generations, taking office, attribute failures in governance to insufficient power, and seek more of it.

Leading an uninstructed people to war is to throw them away.

Donald Trump has encouraged Russians to cyber-hack the United States to give him an edge in an election. And that just shows how serious and seriously misguided Donald Trump is.

The Republican establishment's 2008 embrace of Palin set an irresponsibly low bar. Coincidence or not, a batch of nonsense-spewing, hard-right candidates quickly followed, often to disastrous effect.

We do ourselves as politicians no favours if we are seen to peddle unachievable moonshine.

I personally hold Blair more responsible for this war than I do George Bush. The reason is, Blair knows better, Blair is not an idiot. What is he doing hanging around this guy?

Men are never very wise in the exercise of a new power.

Over the course of history, governments, political regimes, and leaders have done some stupid things despite all arguments to the contrary, at times even against their own self-interest.

Under no circumstances will I allow the Fianna Fail party back into government. They wrecked the economy twice.

A mathematician of the first rank, Laplace quickly revealed himself as only a mediocre administrator; from his first work we saw that we had been deceived. Laplace saw no question from its true point of view; he sought subtleties everywhere; had only doubtful ideas, and finally carried the spirit of the infinitely small into administration.

I love to play it. I think it's funny. It's always been funny to me. Somebody who's large and in charge but totally wrong-headed.

Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?

Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements - and accelerated their ruin.