Here are the top leadership quotes from the top and famous leaders from around the world. The list contains the most inspiring leadership quotes that are useful for students, businessmen, businesswomen, kids and everyone. Most importantly, as the quotes are from different authors, we get to know about various aspects of leadership like you’ll find a great mixture of quotes in terms of funny, short, long, deep, meaningful, inspiring, motivational, straight, wise, educational and so on.
Leadership Quotes
1. Leadership is a conversation. – William A. Adams
2. A leader is a dealer in hope. – Napoléon Bonaparte
3. Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. – Margaret Fuller
4. You manage things; you lead people. – Grace Murray Hopper
5. When people talk, listen completely. – Ernest Hemingway
6. There are no office hours for leaders. – Cardinal J. Gibbons
7. Leadership is an ever-evolving position. – Mike Krzyzewski
8. Leadership is an action, not a position. – Donald McGannon
9. The price of greatness is responsibility. – Winston Churchill
10. Never give an order that can’t be obeyed. – General Douglas MacArthur
11. Great leaders inspire greatness in others. – Lolly Daskal
12. The first key to leadership is self-control. – Jack Weatherford
13. Leaders don’t inflict pain, they share pain. – Max Depree
14. He who has great power should use it lightly. – Seneca
15. Leadership is difficult but it is not complex. – Michael McKinney
16. The supreme quality of leadership is integrity. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
17. Great leaders create more leaders, not followers. – Roy T. Bennett
18. Reason and judgment are the qualities of a leader. – Tacitus
19. Leadership is a skill learned through many venues. – Todd Stocker
20. Cream always rises to the top…so do good leaders. – John Paul Warren
21. Leadership is all about caring, daring and sharing! – Sujit Lalwani
22. Speak Softly and carry a big stick; you will go far. – Theodore Roosevelt
23. Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great. – John D. Rockefeller
24. He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader. – Aristotle
25. Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. – Harry Truman
26. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. – Steve Jobs
27. People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision. – John C. Maxwell
28. Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned. – Harold Geneen
29. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. – Warren G. Bennis
30. Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better. – Bill Bradley
31. The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority.- Kenneth H. Blanchard
32. A leader takes people where they would never go on their own. – Hans Finzel
33. Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others. – Robert Louis Stevenson
34. Every time you have to speak, you are auditioning for leadership. – James Humes
35. In essence, leadership is the sense of calling to a higher purpose. – Amit Ray
36. A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. – John Maxwell
37. Doing what is right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what is right. – Lyndon B Johnson
38. Leaders always choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong. – Orrin Woodward
39. To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart. – Eleanor Roosevelt
40. To be able to lead others, a man must be willing to go forward alone. – Harry Truman
41. Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. – Peter F. Drucker
42. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in. – Seth Godin
43. The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes. – Tony Blair
44. Look over your shoulder now and then to be sure someone’s following you. – Henry Gilmer
45. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together. – Goethe
46. Leadership is getting people to work for you when they are not obligated. – Fred Smith
47. It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse. – Adlai E. Stevenson II
48. The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. – Harvey S. Firestone
49. Example is not the main thing in influencing others; it is the only thing. – Albert Schweitzer
50. A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. – Martin Luther King Jr.
51. Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions. – Harold S. Geneen
52. No great manager or leader ever fell from heaven, its learned not inherited. – Tom Northup
53. True leaders bring out your personal best. They ignite your human potential. – John Paul Warren
54. Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway. – Eleanor Roosevelt
55. It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching. – St. Francis of Assisi
56. The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader. – Albert Einstein
57. Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
58. Real leadership is being the person others will gladly and confidently follow. – John C. Maxwell
59. The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves. – Ray Kroc
60. To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult. – Friedrich Nietzsche
61. Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work. – Seth Godin
62. You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go. – Jeanette Rankin
63. Being a leader isn’t a title, it’s a lifestyle and there is no on and off switch. – Tyconis D. Allison Ty
64. Real leadership is leaders recognizing that they serve the people that they lead. – Pete Hoekstra
65. Ninety percent of leadership is the ability to communicate something people want. – Dianne Feinstein
66. The greatest leaders mobilize others by coalescing people around a shared vision. – Ken Blanchard
67. As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others. – Bill Gates
68. You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that’s assault, not leadership. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
69. Every great leader can take you back to a defining moment when they decided to lead. – John Paul Warren
70. Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems. – Brian Tracy
71. Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. – Harold R. McAlindon
72. The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. – Henry Kissinger
73. I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people. – Mahatma Gandhi
74. People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives. – Theodore Roosevelt
75. You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too. – Sam Rayburn
76. A good leader leads the people from above them. A great leader leads the people from within them. M. D. Arnold
77. Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another. – John C. Maxwell
78. The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them. – Carlos Ghosn
79. One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency. – Arnold Glasow
80. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. – John Quincy Adams
81. Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily, even if you had no title or position. – Brian Tracy
82. Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
83. No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it. – Andrew Carnegie
84. Don’t tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. – George S. Patton Jr.
85. Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths. – John Zenger
86. Wise leaders generally have wise counselors because it takes a wise person themselves to distinguish them. – Diogenes of Sinope
87. A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit. – Arnold Glasow
88. The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist. – Eric Hoffer
89. Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being. – Goethe
90. 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
91. A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others see. – Leroy Eimes
92. Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult. – Warren Bennis
93. You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case. – Ken Kesey
94. Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes. – Peter F. Drucker
95. The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there. – John Buchan
96. The ability to summon positive emotions during periods of intense stress lies at the heart of effective leadership. – Jim Loehr
97. Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy. – Norman Schwarzkopf
98. Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be lead. – Ross Perot
99. 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
100. Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. – Jack Welch