51 Powerful Leadership Quotes by famous Leaders and Thinkers

Leadership quotes can help us boost our leadership skills, improve our self-esteem, help us build self-confidence, make us more socially aware, help us deal with day-to-day challenges and situations.

A good Dalai Lama leadership quote can also help us change our outlook on life, inspire us to make decisions, help us to understand what we need in order to lead our life successfully.

Leadership has been defined in many ways but at its core, it is the ability to influence and motivate others to achieve a common goal. Great leaders possess a number of qualities that allow them to be successful in their roles. These qualities include charisma, intelligence, decisiveness, and the ability to inspire and motivate others.

It is not necessary to have all of the answers or to be the smartest person in the room to be a leader. It’s about being able to make tough decisions, being able to inspire and motivate others, and having the charisma to win people over to your side.

What makes a great leader is the ability to bring people together and get them to buy into a common goal. Leaders must be able to articulate their vision and get others to buy into it. They must also be able to make tough decisions and stand by them. Great leaders are also able to inspire and motivate others to achieve their best.

Leadership Quotes

  1. “Leaders always choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong.” – Orrin Woodward
quotes of leadership by Orrin Woodward

2. “Great leaders create more leaders, not followers.” – Roy T. Bennett

leadership quotes by Roy T Bennett

3. “Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.” – John Maxwell

Leadership quotes: By John Maxewll

4. “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” – Harry S. Truman

Leadership Quote: by Harry S Truman

5. “Success is not how high you have climbed, but how you make a positive difference to the world.” –  Roy T. Bennett

6. “A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.” – John C. Maxwell

7. “A leader is a dealer in hope.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

8. “If you want to rebel, rebel from inside the system.That’s much more powerful than rebelling outside the system.” – Marie Lu

9. “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” – Ronald Reagan

10. “A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.” – Nelson Mandela

11. “He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader.” – Aristotle

12. “The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority.” – Ken Blanchard

13. “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” –  Dwight D. Eisenhower

14. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker

15. “A leader should have higher grit and tenacity, and be able to endure what the employees can’t.” – Jack Ma

16. “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” – Sheryl Sandberg

17. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – William Arthur Ward

18. “Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

19. “I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.” – Robert E. Lee

20. “Leadership is not just about giving energy… it’s unleashing other people’s energy.” – Paul Polman

21. “Don’t follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.” – Margaret Thatcher

22. “Being a leader is making the people you love hate you a little more each day.” – Patrick Ness, 

23. “Leadership should be focused on extending the ladder of opportunity for everyone.” – Justin Trudeau

24. “Leaders don’t force people to follow – they invite them on a journey.” – Charles S. Lauer

25. “Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.” – Warren Bennis

26. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”- George S. Patton

27. “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.” – John C. Maxwell

28.  “Leaders walk a fine line between self-confidence and humility.”  – Stanley McChrystal

29. “I never thought in terms of being a leader. I thought very simply in terms of helping people.” – John Hume

30. “Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.” – Bill Bradley

31. “Leadership should be more participative than directive, more enabling than performing.” – Mary D. Poole

32. “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.” – Martin Luther King Jr

33.  “The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority.” – Kenneth H. Blanchard

34. “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” – Dalai Lama

35. “When the leader lacks confidence, the followers lack commitment.” – John C. Maxwell

36. “Wise leaders generally have wise counselors because it takes a wise person themselves to distinguish them.” – Diogenes

37. “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.” – Colin Powell

38. “A successful person finds the right place for himself. But a successful leader finds the right place for others. ” – John C. Maxwell

39. “Every time you have to speak, you are auditioning for leadership.” James Humes

40. “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” – Rosalynn Carter

41. “Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do.” – Max De Pree

42. “Lead me, follow me, or get the hell out of my way.” – George Patton

43. “A person who is quietly confident makes the best leader.” – Fred Wilson

44. “Leaders shouldn’t attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can’t compromise.” – Peter F. Drucker

45. “Leaders live by choice, not by accident.” – Mark Gorman

46. “Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.” – Vince Lombardi

47. “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” — Bill Gates

48. “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” – Lao Tzu

49. “You can be a leader in your workplace, your neighborhood, or your family, all without having a title.” – Travis Bradberry

50. “Leadership is the challenge to be something more than average.” — Jim Rohn

51. “A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others see.” – Leroy Eimes

We hope you enjoyed our article on leadership quotes. We have spent a lot of time looking through the most popular leadership quotes to bring you the most interesting, and inspirational ones. We hope you enjoyed reading them as much as we did!

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