Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.
The ultimate test of practical leadership is the realization of intended, real change that meets people’s enduring needs.
Such leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.
Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation’s conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership.
To elevate the goals of humankind, to achieve high moral purpose, to realize major intended change, leaders must thrust themselves into the most intractable processes and structures of history and ultimately master them.
The practice of leadership is not the same as the exercise of power.
Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.
Those who remember only that the Roosevelts served hot dogs to the royals will be fascinated by this well-researched account of an historic and ennobling relationship – a great story!
Leaders are not pale reflectors of major social conflicts; they play up some, play down others, ignore still others.
A revolution is an act of violence whereby one class shatters the authority of another.
A leader and a tyrant are polar opposites.
Moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of the followers.
There is an important difference between the politician who is simply an able tactician, and the politician who is a creative political.
In brief, leaders with motive and power bases tap followers’ motives in order to realize the purposes of both leaders and followers.
Power wielders may treat people as things. Leaders may not.
The nation, the Supreme Court has said, has “no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.” The.