Quotes about Leadership

We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.

knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

"There are things more important," he told me, "than getting reelected."

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.