Quotes about Leadership

The cynics may be the loudest voices, but I promise you, they will accomplish the least.

We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

Leadership isn't just legislation, that it's a matter of persuading people and giving them confidence, and bringing them together and setting a tone.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or time. We are the ones we've been waiting for change we seek.

It's like moving-in day on a college campus, except a large percentage of the people involved are middle-aged, in suits, and, along with you, charged with running the most powerful nation on earth.

Maybe nothing would come of my Cairo speech. Maybe the dysfunction of the Middle East would play itself out regardless of what I did. Maybe the best we could hope for was to placate men like Mubarak and kill those who would try to kill us. Maybe, as the Pyramids had whispered, none of it mattered in the long run. But on the only scale that any of us can truly comprehend, the span of centuries, the actions of an American president sixty-five years earlier had set the world on a better course.

It went fine for us," I said. "But based on what I just saw, we better win this thing or the country is screwed.

If I aspired to lead the free world, I decided, I'd have to make climate change a priority of my campaign and my presidency.

Despite all that, they'd given me a chance. Through the noise and chatter of the political circus, they'd heard my call for something different. Even if I hadn't always been at my best, they'd divined what was best in me: the voice insisting that for all our differences, we remained bound as one people, and that, together, men and women of goodwill could find a way to a better future.

As much as Tim blamed himself during the next morning's postmortem, I recognized it as a systems failure—and a failure on my part to put those who worked under me in a position to succeed.

Michelle shook her head and looked out the window. We both knew what I was asking for. Another disruption. Another gamble. Another step in the direction of something I wanted and she truly didn't. "This is it, Barack," Michelle said. "One last time. But don't expect me to do any campaigning. In fact, you shouldn't even count on my vote.

Whenever I write a letter to a family who has lost a loved one in Iraq, or read an email from a constituent who has dropped out of college because her student aid has been cut, I'm reminded that the actions of those in power have enormous consequences—a price that they themselves almost never have to pay.