Harry S. Truman Quotes

We must be part of the general staff at the inception, rather than the ambulance drivers at the bitter end.

[Writing of Harry Truman:] The 1947 assumption of responsibility in the Eastern Mediterranean, the 1948 grandeur of the Marshall Plan, the response to the blockade of Berlin, the NATO defense of Europe in 1949, and the intervention in Korea in 1950—all those constituted expanded action in truly heroic mold. All of them required rare capacity to decide and act.

This is the sort of decision that presidents must make: Hard choices with insufficient information.

A good executive, when things aren't going well, gets down and finds out what's going wrong and tries to fix it.

It's one of the things that I tend to do, make the right decision, right time, and get the right reactions and capitalize on it.

In life and business, there are two cardinal sins, the first is to act precipitously without thought, and the second is to not act at all. Unfortunately the board of directors and top management of Times Warner already committed the first sin by merging with AOL, and we believe they are currently in the process of committing the second; now is not a time to move slowly and suffer the paralysis of inaction.

Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.

You can judge a leader by the size of the problem he tackles. Other people can cope with the waves, it's his job to watch the tide.

Great leaders don't rush to blame. They instinctively look for solutions.

No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job.

Politics is not a tea party. When it is time to act, you have to move fast and decisively.

Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that crisis lands like a thud on the Oval Office desk?

The president of the United States actually has to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Good leaders need a positive agenda, not just an agenda of dealing with crisis.

A president must be on the job 24/7, ready for any contingency, any crisis, anywhere, anytime.

One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.

Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.

The people expect the President to be on top of everything.

If you are going to be a wartime president, you have to have the characteristic of being able to be very, very hard.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can't just pop off or lash out irrationally.

I work with the president and speak with him multiple times a week. This is a man, he didn't become the president by accident. And as much as everyone wants to talk about stability, was he unstable when he passed the tax reform? Was he unstable when we finally hit back at Syria and said no more chemical weapons?

There is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there's one thing I've learned throughout my work in finance, government, and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.

Presidents have to learn how to adapt. Every president comes into the job; it's different than they expect. They must adapt.

If you're on a bus and going down a snowy mountain like in Tahoe, and the bus loses its brakes, where do you want to be sitting? Immediately, you all think, 'In the back.' But in the front would be the correct answer. As a quarterback, you want to take control of it.

I've kind of found out that when I do get into trouble, that when I do have people on base, sometimes the best thing is to throw a little bit more off-speed, back off a little bit.