Moral Leadership Quotes

… shining city upon a hill

Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers. And it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers

You need a president whom you can trust, someone who will not steal your money, a president who is sincere, brave and just.

When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty.

If Christians should vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease. They would elect every clean candidate in the United States, and defeat every soiled one. Their prodigious power would be quickly realized and recognized, and afterward there would be no unclean candidates upon any ticket, and graft would cease.

When America does what's right, it's such a light on this planet.

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

In the case of Papa Pope, certainly he's making his daughter's world and the world of the republic a much better place.

Statesmen think in terms of history and view society as an organism. Prophets are different since they believe absolute aims can be achieved in the foreseeable future. More people have been killed by crusaders than by statesmen.

...the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword." "...a ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.

Those who are successfully to lead their fellow-men, should have once possessed the nobler feelings. We have all known individuals whose magnanimity was not likely to be troublesome on any occasion; but then they betrayed their own interests by unwisely omitting the consideration, that such feelings might exist in the breasts of those whom they had to guide and govern: for they themselves cannot even remember the time when in their eyes justice appeared preferable to expediency, the happiness of others to self-interest, or the welfare of a State to the advancement of a party.

Americans should expect far more from a president than merely that he not be provably a criminal. They should expect a president to comport himself in accordance with the high duties of his office.

The Church of England hasn't often produced great men in modern times. But I have long believed that George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958, was such a man.

Self-preservation shouldn't be the first instinct in politics. It should be doing the right thing for the country.

We don't pray for the land. We pray for the humans, all humans... starting with the president, Mohammed Morsi, and all officials, and for God to give everyone wisdom and responsibility to manage the affairs of this country and its people in true Egyptian spirit.

I don't believe in anarchy, because it will ultimately amount to the power of the bully, with weapons. Gandhi is my life's inspiration: passive resistance. I don't want to live in the Thunderdome with Mad Max.

No man can do both effective and decent work in public life unless he is a practical politician on the one hand, and a sturdy believer in Sunday-school politics on the other. He must always strive manfully for the best, and yet, like Abraham Lincoln, must often resign himself to accept the best possible.

The President was a responsibility beyond that of managing the government. He has a responsibility as a moral leader.

Leadership is much less about what you do, and much more about who you are. If you view leadership as a bag of manipulative tricks or charismatic behaviors to advance your own personal interest, then people have every right to be cynical. But if your leadership flows first and foremost from inner character and integrity of ambition, then you can justly ask people to lend themselves to your organization and its mission.

Leadership is not manifested by coercion, even against the resented. Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any methods.

Our diplomacy and development budget is not just about reducing spending and finding efficiencies. We need a frank conversation about what we stand for as that 'shining city on a hill.' And that conversation begins by acknowledging that we can't do it on the cheap.

Bring back that better era of the republic in which, when men consecrated themselves to the public service, they utterly abnegated all selfish purposes.

The story of Jackie Robinson is also the story of Branch Rickey. He had many reasons for doing what he did, but he stood up against his own people.

Let no man give advice to others that he has not first given himself.

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.