Mark Goulston Quotes

To be a great leader, one unfortunately needs a war.

I am obliged to deal with hundreds of men and to make them live without killing the reader.

Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity

I think it's hard to know how one deals in situations of confrontation until you're actually in there, so I'm not going to speculate on what I would do.

I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation.

The greatest presidents have been those who demonstrated astute judgment in times of crisis - often despite the advice they were getting.

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

Any kind of conflict draws me to a role.

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

Any good director, and I've worked with a few that I would call very good, they know how to disarm any anxieties very quickly.

The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.

If we don't stop somewhere, if we don't accept an unhappy compromise, unhappy for both sides, if we don't learn how to unhappily coexist and contain our burned sense of injustice - if we don't learn how to do that, we end up in a doomed state.

You never want conflict. But sometimes conflict is inevitable.

September 11 was horrific, but I've been through enough crises before that I had my own pattern as to how to collect facts, what a leader should do, how to communicate with people, how to set up operating mechanisms to work our way through it.

I'm not going to sit here and bash the manager, we have to regroup.

I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.

We are fighting in our own house. It is useless to live on burned ruins.

I’ve worked as a leader for many years and I’ve always trained myself to be prepared for the worst.

You don’t quit when you are in the middle of a conflict…. My job was not to have a fit and walk out. My job was to give the President my best advice.

In every conflict we make mistakes. The trick is to fix them.

There's certain things that we do work with Russia on, and then there's certain things when they do something wrong, I have no problem calling them out on it.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

Personally criticizing a member of my staff hardly seemed like the way to negotiate a deal.

A Treasury Secretary or a President should be out here not fighting S&P, not grabbing the other coach and slapping him around, taking the umpire behind the barn. He should be getting the team psyched to overcome.

In the heat of battle you might not be thinking clearly and that is when players have to take on the responsibility of helping the other guys out.