George W. Bush Quotes

The foundation of leadership is your own moral compass. I think the best quality leaders really know where their moral compass is. They get it out when they are making decisions. It's their guide. But not only do you have to have a moral compass and take it out of your pocket, it has to have a true north.

Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.

Leadership is all about right and wrong.

Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

I have a pretty keen ethical compass.

Politics are important but your soul lasts forever. So, you know, you make ... decisions on what you think is right or wrong and then you just go forward.

I decide on the basis of conscience. A genuine leader doesn't reflect consensus, he molds consensus.

The recognition of the sanctity of the life of every man is the first and only basis of all morality.

Leadership is not about popularity, it is about doing what is right.

A president must make decisions based upon principle and stand by the principles by which he makes decisions in order to achieve peace.

When you're president, you can't vote present. You have to make a decision. Sometimes it's a split second decision. You don't have time to think about it. You've got to actually decide.

Leadership, in short, is power governed by principle, directed toward raising people to their highest levels of personal motive and social morality.

Batman is the one you go to for answers and Clark Kent is the one you go to to really do the right thing. He stands as a shining example of what to do in any situation.

Unless virtue guide us our choice must be wrong.

The establishment uses that rationale all the time, and that's why we do what we do. But leadership requires some understanding that you can say no. People have base instincts, but the transcendent also appeal to them.

You can never predict what kind of tough decisions are going to come in front of a President's desk. But if you can trust they will do the right thing, and maybe the hard thing, and maybe not the popular thing, and if you really want to know how a person will operate, look at how they've lived their life.

Most of us follow our conscience as we follow a wheelbarrow. We push it in front of us in the direction we want to go.

Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.

Even if lives did hang in the balance, it would depend on whose they were.

I don't see how anyone could really think that if you have a choice between saving the life of one person and saving the lives of a million people, to say - well, I've saved the one - can you really take that seriously? I can't.

Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.

I would prefer to let the president make the decisions that the president needs to make.

He's not a bold decision maker like Newt Gingrich is. Every time I talk to him, he says 'well let me think about it.'