Lynda Obst Quotes

There are two parts to influence: First, influence is powerful; and second, influence is subtle. You wouldn't let someone push you off course, but you might let someone nudge you off course and not even realize it.

You can be powerful without being loud and aggressive.

The President spoke loudly but carried a small stick.

The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.

As president, I was more successful; I had more opportunity than as prime minister. Why? I didn't have the power to give orders, to command, but I had the opportunity to call people to volunteer. In my period of presidency, I never heard the word 'no.'

I've learned over the years to hear what Putin is railing against in his own railing way.

If you have to remind people you're the boss, I don't think you're going to be a very effective leader.

Being a woman is a very powerful thing, I think, and you don't want to abuse that.

Leaders should never, ever try to look cool - that's for dictators

I still feel that the kind of leader I want to be is one that spends time understanding our work in a way that allows me to translate it for policymakers and people who have real access to resources.

To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.

A poor leader will tell you how many people work for them. A great leader will tell you how many people they work for.

For Rousseau and Mandeville the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity, they were nothing but the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.

Persuasion is the resource of the feeble; and the feeble can seldom persuade . . .

Any group of people that has been subordinate absorbs the idea of our own subordination, and that it is natural, and comes to think that the only way to survive is to identify with the powerful. And I think that is not surprising, and it is what happens to a lot of right-wing women. I mean they think they better do what the powerful tell them do otherwise they'll be in even more trouble.

Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups.

Great leaders don't try to please everyone. Great leaders don't water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. Instead, they realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.

Whereas ordinary officers must be content with behaving correctly in front of their men, the great leaders have always carefully stage-managed their effects.

Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any 'abuse' came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.

The competent leader of men cares little for the niceties of other peoples' characters: he cares much--everything--for the exterior uses to which they may be put.... These are men to be moved. How should he move them? He supplies the power; others simply the materials on which that power operates.

The power is detested, and miserable the life, of him who wishes to be feared rather than to be loved.

The media is the message and the messenger, and increasingly a powerful one.

The most powerful demonstration of leadership is not a clenched fist of brute force but an open hand of humble assistance.

the less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa - blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men - yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful.