Leadership Selection Quotes

The responsibility of leadership is not taken, it is given. Only when others choose to follow us can we truly lead.

Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible.

Let princes choose ministers … rather upon conscience than upon bravery.

This day I learned that the caucus club meets at certain times in the garret of Tom Dawes, the adjutant of the Boston regiment.... There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one end of the room to another. There they drink flip, I suppose, and there they choose a moderator who puts questions to the vote regularly; and selectmen, assessors, collectors, firewards, and representatives are regularly chosen before they are chosen in the town [of Boston].

It's for the Palestinians to decide who will lead them.

Politics is a pure meritocracy. That's why Gordon Brown's cabinet had two brothers and a married couple in it. They just happened to be the best people around.

Ever since John Kennedy, Democrats have had a weakness for dashing younger men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, I suppose, Jimmy Carter. They balance their tickets with senior statesmen - Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden, Walter Mondale. (Al Gore was young but played ancient).

It bodes very ill for government when men are exalted to places of high trust through their own solicitations. He only fills a place with dignity who is invited to it by his fellow citizens from the experience they have had of his adequate abilities.

Can a Congress worker ever think of becoming a Prime Minister? No. Because that seat is reserved by birth in that party.

All leaders in the Lord's Church are called by proper authority. No prophet or any other leader in this Church, for that matter, has ever called himself or herself. No prophet has ever been elected.

Democracy, in brief, requires government by parties because the citizens are too numerous, too ill-informed and too preoccupied to come together spontaneously to choose the policies and leaders they wish to prevail. Political machinery has to be worked. The parties work it.

The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most - for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?

We have 57 choices of ketchup and 500 TV channels. Very nearly everything has been disrupted in the country, from how we buy groceries to how we consume news, except for the system that produces the political leadership of the country.

We made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers

No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.

Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be 'discovered' by an election.

The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader.

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

The throne we honour is the people's choice.

We choose our leaders, political or spiritual, out of our own confusion, and so they also are confused.

Michael Owen was made a captain ahead of me.

Public opinion is not always mistaken; sometimes even it chooses the right man.

In our party, for the post of the prime minister or chief minister, there is no race, and nor does anyone stake their claim. Who will be the prime minister or chief minister, either our parliamentary board decides on this or the elected MLAs, in the case of chief minister, and MPs, in the case of the prime minister, select their leader.

After Trump, how can we credibly say that our process for choosing a national leader yields the best possible result, or even someone capable of uniting the country, let alone running it?

The next big decision [of Donald Trump], chief of staff. And the two names talked about the most, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus. Both allies, but they send quite a different message.