With conglomerates selling companies to liquidators, who close down plants and move to non-union areas, it’s about time progressive union leaders step in to stop such job-losing tactics.… ESOP should become a part of future bargaining packages! [President Local 1729, U.S. Steel Workers Union, June 7, 1975.]
So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do.
Business and labor are both in the same boat and it is almost suicidal for workers to think they can prosper by making it less profitable (or completely unprofitable) to employ them. Most glaring example of this kind of suicide is the Maritime Union which was so successful in getting all the wage increases it demanded that the American flag vanished from the seven seas…. Railroad labor has been almost equally successful in pricing itself out of the market…. Admittedly these may be extreme examples of labor pricing itself out of work, but union leaders would be wise to recognize before it is too late that they are harnessing the profit motive to disemployment when they force wage increases far in excess of productivity gains…. [S]uccess will depend on the employers’ willingness to offer such generous profit sharing that every worker will realize that his own bread is richly buttered on the same side as his employer’s and will have a maximum incentive to maximize productivity and minimize waste in order to increase his own income.
Thriving leaders are the ones surrounded by diverse people from different generations.
If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program — immediately, if not sooner. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society — Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
All we have is the undying belief of this one person of a world that exists in the future and his ability to communicate it in a way that lets us imagine it as clearly. All leaders must have two things: they must have a vision of the world that does not exist and they must have the ability to communicate it.
In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.
No party is as bad as its leaders.
Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs.
Collective bargaining has become a dog chasing its own tail, with inflation eating up wage increases before workers ever get a chance to spend them. Even the union leaders who bring home the fattest contracts these days are concluding that some new stabilizing element is needed to keep the extra purchasing power from draining out of their members’ pay envelopes.[p]The welcome fruit of this discontent may be a growing concentration on wage plans geared to sharing efficiency, as measured by productivity or profits, in place of the sterile “battle for the buck.” [Labor Editor, New York Times ]
Working together, we can build a world in which the rule of law — not the rule of force — governs relations between states. A world in which leaders respect the rights of their people, and nations seek peace, not destruction or domination. And neither we nor anyone else should live in fear ever again.
The Israelitish people never was good for much, as its own leaders, judges, rulers, prophets have a thousand times reproachfully declared; it possesses few virtues, and most of the faults of other nations; but in cohesion, steadfastness, valour, and when all this would not serve, in obstinate toughness, it has no match.
Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners! Lao Tse, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Gurdjiev, Krishnamurti.
Forte scutum salus ducum=--The safety of leaders is a strong shield.
I’ve learned about leadership is that leaders are those individuals who do the things that failures aren’t willing to do—even though they might not like doing them either. They have the discipline to do what they know to be important—and right—versus what’s easy and fun.
Let us not confuse objectives with methods. Too many so-called leaders of the nation fail to see the forest because of the trees. Too many of them fail to recognize the vital necessity of planning for definite objectives. True leadership calls for the setting forth of the objectives and the rallying of public opinion in support of these objectives. Do not confuse objectives with methods. When the nation becomes substantially united in favor of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods. The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach. We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young. Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you. May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking! [Commencement speech at Oglethorpe University, May 22, 1932.]
Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel!
Your leaders wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them.--_Johnson._
Lenin’s and Stalin’s form of communism is gone, yet its trappings have been expropriated by mega-corporations. We have companies featuring central planning by troikas, mission statements crafted by apparatchiks, five-year plans, no right to choose leaders in companies, no democracy in the workplace, a clear distinction between intelligentsia and peasants (top CEOs make 152 times the median salary and enjoy company dachas, jets, and limos), and state monitoring (time clocks, dress codes, drug screening, “employee assistance” plans, e-mail monitoring, no smoking, and other personal conduct rules, as well as family-life audits).
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
Just as the medieval church cut off the congregation from participating in the sung worship of the service, today many well-meaning Christian leaders have reconstructed a sung worship wherein congregational participation does not matter.
Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.
The Flag links up the past and the present. It is the legacy bequeathed to us by the architects of our liberty. … The world is full of misunderstandings, suspicions and distrusts. In these difficult days it depends on us under what banner we fight. Here we are Putting in the very centre the white, the white of the Sun's rays. The white means the path of light … the ideal light, the light of truth … The Asoka's wheel represents to us the wheel of the Law, the wheel Dharma. Truth can be gained only by the pursuit of the path of Dharma, by the practice of virtue. ...the orange, the Bhagwa colour, represents the spirit of renunciation. All forms of renunciation are to be embodied in Raja Dharma. … Our leaders must be disinterested. They must be dedicated spirits … the green is there, our relation to the soil, our relation to the plant life here, on which all other life depends. We must build our Paradise, here on this green earth... This flag tells us "Be ever alert, be ever on the move, go forward, work for a free, flexible, compassionate, decent, democratic society in which Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists will all find a safe shelter." Let us all unite under this banner and rededicate ourselves to the ideas our flag symbolizes.
The social leaders who refuse to allow politics into society are as foreseeing as the soldiers who refuse to allow politics to permeate the army. Society is like the sexual appetite; one does not know at what forms of perversion it may not arrive, once we have allowed our choice to be dictated by aesthetic considerations.
Churches become unsafe places if its leaders fail to be honest, transparent, and reliable. Sincerity may not be the final basis of truth, but there is no deep truth communicated where sincerity is lacking.
[H]ere is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today’s industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ] However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
The greatest men of any age, those who become its leaders when there is a great march to be begun, are separated from the average intellects of their day by a distance which is immeasurable in ordinary terms of wonder.
U.S. labor leaders will realize that automation can multiply man’s wealth far more rapidly than it is multiplying at present and that automation will leave all men free to search and research…. Realizing the direct competition with foreign industry on a straight labor basis will mean swiftly decreasing wages per hour and longer hours and decreasing buying power of the public…. American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems: The Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor. [Quoted by Jack Kemp in The New Conservative Digest , October 1982, p. 23.]
Dean Stanley told me he thought being made a bishop destroyed a man's moral courage. I am inclined to think that the practice of the methods of political leaders destroys their intellect for all serious purposes.
Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate. [Quoted in 2007 New York Times interview.]
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
It is perfectly clear that people, given no alternative, will choose tyranny over anarchy, because anarchy is the worst tyranny of all…. The special nature of liberties is that they can be defended only as long as we still have them. So the very first signs of their erosion must be resisted, whether the issue be domestic surveillance by the Army, so-called preventive detention, or the freedom of corporate television, or that of a campus newspaper…. It is an eternal error to believe that a cause considered righteous sanctifies unrighteous methods…. It is eternally true that both successful and unsuccessful revolutions increase the power of the state, not that of the individual…. We are learning that affluence without simplicity is a giant trap; that poverty itself is endurable, but not poverty side by side with affluence. Our political leaders are learning that Sophocles was right: nothing that is vast enters into the affairs of mortals without a curse, and that vast American power has now produced its curse…. What counts most in the long haul of adult life is not brilliance, or charisma, or derring-do, but rather the quality that the Romans called “gravitas” — patience, stamina, and weight of judgment…. The prime virtue is courage, because it makes all other virtues possible. [Highlights from the speech made by Eric Sevareid, CBS chief Washington correspondent, at the 80th Annual Stanford University Commencement, June 13, 1971.]
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life. But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. The process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course. Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed before-hand that caused men to make laws in the first place. [ The Law . Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1974, pp. 5-6.]
<...> many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King saw American slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease. If the degree of their revulsion varied, they agreed that the nation would be much safer, purer, happier, and better off without the racial slavery that they had inherited from previous generations and, some of them would emphasize, from England. Most of them also believed that America would be an infinitely better and less complicated place without the African American population, which most white leaders associated with all the defects, mistakes, sins, shortcomings, and animality of an otherwise almost perfect nation.
It is our hope for ourselves, and for His truth, and for mankind. Men come and go. Leaders, teachers, thinkers, speak and work for a season, and then fall silent and impotent. He abides. They die, but He lives. They are lights kindled, and therefore, sooner or later quenched, but He is the true Light from which they draw all their brightness, and He shines for evermore.--_Alex. McLaren._
Nothing is more offensive to reason= (_widerwartiger_) =than an appeal to the majority; it consists of a few powerful leaders, of rogues who accommodate themselves, of weaklings who assimilate themselves, and of the mass who follow confusedly, without in the least knowing what they would be at.
Why would you say that?” “It’s true enough. His father’s name is Caleb. He’s my uncle. He’s one of the leaders of our people. He’s from a very fine family, but I’m not.” “I don’t believe that.” “If you ever visit our camp, just ask about me.” He smiled at her. He was a good-looking fellow, she noted, with an easy manner about him, quite unlike his cousin. “They wouldn’t send a man who wasn’t reliable on a mission like this,” she said. “You know I haven’t figured that out yet. It was a strange choice.” Rahab was quiet for a time, and he studied her. She was one of the most attractive women he had ever seen, much fairer than the women of his people.
Only the mediocre die always at their best. Real leaders are always improving—and raising their bar on how superbly they can perform and how quickly they can move. —JEAN GIRAUDOUX
I realize that the MX missile is none of our concern. I realize that the whole point of living in a democracy is that we pay professional congresspersons to concern themselves with things like the MX missile so we can be free to concern ourselves with getting hold of the plumber. But from time to time, I feel I must address major public issues such as this, because in a free and open society, where the very future of the world hinges on decisions made by our elected leaders, you never win large cash journalism awards if you stick to the topics I usually write about, such as nose-picking. -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against Political Fallout"
Due to a shortage of devoted followers, the production of great leaders</p> has been discontinued.
Persistence in one opinion has never been considered a merit in political
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares", 1st century BC
Now, if the leaders of the world -- people who are leaders by virtue of political, military or financial power, and not necessarily wisdom or consideration for mankind -- if these leaders manage not to pull us over the brink into planetary suicide, despite their occasional pompous suggestions that they may feel obliged to do so, we may survive beyond 1988. -- George Rostky, EE Times, June 20, 1988 p. 45
However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism." -- Senator Barry Goldwater, from the Congressional Record, September 16, 1981
Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
A prominent broadcaster, on a big-game safari in Africa, was taken to a watering hole where the life of the jungle could be observed. As he looked down from his tree platform and described the scene into his tape recorder, he saw two gnus grazing peacefully. So preoccupied were they that they failed to observe the approach of a pride of lions led by two magnificent specimens, obviously the leaders. The lions charged, killed the gnus, and dragged them into the bushes where their feasting could not be seen. A little while later the two kings of the jungle emerged and the radioman recorded on his tape: "Well, that's the end of the gnus and here, once again, are the head lions."
When the leaders speak of peace The common folk know That war is coming When the leaders curse war The mobilization order is already written out. Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought Hopefully I take my place among the sellers. -- Bertolt Brecht, "Hollywood"
The Army needs leaders the way a foot needs a big toe. -- Bill Murray
Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. -- Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune"
"...I could accept this openness, glasnost, perestroika, or whatever you want to call it if they did these things: abolish the one party system; open the Soviet frontier and allow Soviet people to travel freely; allow the Soviet people to have real free enterprise; allow Western businessmen to do business there, and permit freedom of speech and of the press. But so far, the whole country is like a concentration camp. The barbed wire on the fence around the Soviet Union is to keep people inside, in the dark. This openness that you are seeing, all these changes, are cosmetic and they have been designed to impress shortsighted, naive, sometimes stupid Western leaders. These
appease it. He will say: "Yes, we can do business!" This while his
military machine in Afghanistan has killed over a million people out of a
population of 17 million. Can you imagine that?
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110
The crowd was in high spirits. “These Bolsheviki _will_ try to dictate to the _intelligentzia?_ We’ll show them!”... Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between this assemblage and the Congress of Soviets. There, great masses of shabby soldiers, grimy workmen, peasants--poor men, bent and scarred in the brute struggle for existence; here the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary leaders--Avksentievs, Dans, Liebers,--the former Socialist Ministers--Skobelievs, Tchernovs,--rubbed shoulders with Cadets like oily Shatsky, sleek Vinaver; with journalists, students, intellectuals of almost all camps. This Duma crowd was well-fed, well-dressed; I did not see more than three proletarians among them all....