Leadership Flaws Quotes

As much as we admire all the characteristics of a Ronald Reagan, as soon as something goes wrong, people will hate those same characteristics.

You have two enemies in war. The guy who is trying to shoot you, and the guy who is ordering you out to be shot.

Maybe strong leaders are not quite as alluring as we think, and we should celebrate the fact that our leaders are just like us. Just because one candidate can't remember his whole speech and the other likes to put his feet up on the job doesn't mean they can't govern.

When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

Many punishments sometimes, and in some cases, as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician.

Military men predominated and gave no thought to the larger situation. They knew how to advance but not how to retreat.

Princes rule the people, and their own passions rule Princes; but Providence can over-rule the whole, and draw the instruments of his inscrutable purposes from the vices, no less than the virtues of Kings.

Plato assumes somehow that government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?

Our Presidents have ranged from the disgraceful to the heroic, but almost none of them were actually normal human beings.

The leaders of the people cause them to err.

These are the six ways of courting defeat - neglect to estimate the enemy's strength; want of authority; defective training; unjustifiable anger; nonobservance of discipline; failure to use picked men.

[Charles de Gaulle] has been abysmally careless, like a man running a bus over mountains, who forgot to equip it with good brakes.

Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

President Reagan didn't always know what he knew.

I have always resented the way the other sultans and emirs of my time have become too caught up in glory, pride and wealth

One of Trump's vulnerabilities is that he doesn't always vet his people, whether it's business partners, the dubious characters he retweets, or the foreign leaders who show up at his door.

I would caution all of us or I would remind all of us that any candidate that we support, they are going to be flawed.

It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible.

Remember, it is not about voting for the perfect candidate - there is no such thing. Presidents are human.

Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom.

He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his senses.

If I tell him [President Abraham Lincoln] my [war] plans they will be in the New York Herald tomorrow morning. He can’t keep a secret.

The admission of one man, either hereditarily or for life only, into the place of chief of a country, is an evidence of the infirmity of man. Nature has set up no difference between a king and other men; a king, therefore, is purely the creation of our own hands.

Even a president makes mistakes.