130 Leadership Quotes for Aspiring New Leaders

Leadership quotes offer insight and inspiration on guiding others, making impactful decisions, and fostering growth. These words motivate leaders to inspire, empower, and lead with vision and integrity.

Leadership Quotes

Leadership….a simple definition of leadership is – It’s an art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal. But in today’s throat cutting competitive environment designated managers pretend to be leaders. The real leaders are who create leaders for future generations. Here are best leadership quotes for aspiring new leaders to cultivate their leadership quality.

Leadership Quotes for Aspiring New Leaders

  1. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” ~ Steve Jobs

Leadership Quotes

  1. “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Leadership Quotes

  1. “Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.” ~ Bill Bradley

Leadership Quotes

  1. A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” ~ John C. Maxwell

leadership quotes

  1. “People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
  2. “Don’t follow the crowd. Let the crowd follow you.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
  3. “A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.” ~ Arnold H. Glasow
  4. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ~ Margaret Fuller
  5. “A leader is admired, a boss is feared.” ~ Vicente Del Bosque
  6. “To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
  1. “Without initiative, leaders are simply workers in leadership positions.” ~ Bo Bennett
  2. “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.”  ~ John C. Maxwell
  3. “A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.” ~ Max Lucado
  4. “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” ~ Alexander The Great
  5. “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” ~ Warren Bennis

quotes for new leaders

  1. “Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.” ~ Seth Godin
  2. “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” ~ Ronald Reagan
  3. “Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.” ~ Harold S. Geneen
  4. “Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems.” ~ Brian Tracy
  5. “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” ~ Lao Tzu

Quotes on Leadership

  1. “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” ~ Ralph Nader
  2. “Sometimes leadership is planting trees under whose shade you’ll never sit.” ~ Jennifer Granholm
  3. “You manage things; you lead people.” ~ Grace Murray Hopper
  4. “The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.” ~ Tony Blair
  5. “Great leaders delegate and nurture future leaders.” ~ Invajy

Leadership Quotes

  1. “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” ~ Jack Welch
  2. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” ~ Peter Drucker
  3. “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.” ~ Warren Bennis
  4. “To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
  5.  “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” ~ Rosalynn Carter
  6. “One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.” ~ Arnold Glasow
  7. “You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.” ~ Henry Ford
  8. “Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.” ~ Michael Jordan
  9. “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” ~ John F. Kennedy
  10. “Leadership Is the ability to get extraordinary achievement from ordinary people” ~ Brian Tracy

Leadership Quotes

  1. “Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
  2. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Maya Angelou
  3. “Success isn’t about how much money you make; it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.” ~ Michelle Obama
  4. “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
  5. “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” ~ Max DePree

Quotes for New Leaders

  1. “To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence … When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’” ~ Lao Tzu
  2. “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
  3. “When people talk, listen completely.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
  4. “If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you.” ~ Indra Nooyi
  5. “Every time you have to speak, you are auditioning for leadership.” ~ James Humes

Leadership Quotes

  1. “Don’t follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
  2. “To add value to others, one must first value others.” ~ John Maxwell
  3. “The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.” ~ Ray Kroc
  4. “Leaders don’t inflict pain, they share pain.” ~ Max Depree
  5. “People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.” ~ John Maxwell
  6.  “Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
  7. “What you do has far greater impact than what you say.” ~ Stephen Covey
  8. “A leader is someone who holds herself or himself accountable for finding the potential in people and processes.” ~ Brene Brown
  9. “Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people,’ that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” ~ Peter F. Drucker
  10. “I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Leadership Quotes

  1. “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” ~ Albert Einstein
  2. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
    ~ John Quincy Adams
  3. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
  4. “The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.” ~ Theodore M. Hesburgh
  5. “Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It’s about impact, influence, and inspiration.” ~ Robin S. Sharma

Leadership Quotes from Inspiring Leaders

  1. “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” ~ Sheryl Sanberg
  2. “The price of greatness is responsibility.” ~ Winston Churchill
  3. “If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, then, you are an excellent leader.” ~ Dolly Parton 
  4. “No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.” ~ Andrew Carnegie
  5. “People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.” ~ Michelle Obama
  6. “Management is doing the right thing; leadership is doing the right things.” ~ Peter F. Drucker
  7. “Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.” ~ Vince Lombardi
  8. Ninety percent of leadership is the ability to communicate something people want.” ~ Dianne Feinstein
  9. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
  10. “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  11. “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
  12. “A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  13. “A good leader leads the people from above them. A great leader leads the people from within them.” ~ M.D. Arnold
  14. “Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
  15. “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” ~ Dale Carnegie
  16. “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.”~ John Kenneth Galbraith
  17. “Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.” ~ John Maxwell
  18. “Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily, even if you had no title or position.” ~ Brian Tracy
  19. “Doing what is right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what is right.”~ Lyndon B. Johnson
  20. “There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.”~ Indira Gandhi

Quotes about Leadership

  1. “Taking responsibility of failure and giving credit of success to others is biggest quality of leaders.” ~ Invajy
  2. “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” ~ Edith Wharton
  3. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” ~ Winston Churchill
  4. “Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths.” ~ John Zenger
  5. “A leader is not an administrator who loves to run others, but someone who carries water for his people so that they can get on with their jobs.” ~ Robert Townsend
  6. “Look over your shoulder now and then to be sure someone’s following you.” ~ Henry Gilmer
  7. “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” ~ Woodrow Wilson
  8. “In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.” ~ Harry S. Truman
  9. “Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.” ~ Stephen Covey
  10. “Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned.”~ Harold Geneen
  11. “A leader should be able to foresee crisis situations and be proactive” ~ Invajy
  12. “I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” ~ Ralph Nader
  13. “The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.”~ John Buchan
  14. “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
  15. “Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar.” ~ Orrin Woodward
  16. “I think one of the keys to leadership is recognizing that everybody has gifts and talents. A good leader will learn how to harness those gifts toward the same goal.” ~ Ben Carson
  17. “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” ~ Bill Gates
  18. “Wise leaders generally have wise counselors because it takes a wise person themselves to distinguish them.” ~ Diogenes of Sinope
  19. “The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” ~ Harvey S. Firestone
  20. “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.” ~ Peter F. Drucker
  21. “A leader is a person you will follow to a place you would not go by yourself.” ~ Joel Barker
  22. “Real leadership is leaders recognizing that they serve the people that they lead.” ~ Pete Hoekstra
  23. “A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.” ~ Jim Rohn
  24. “Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.” ~ Douglas MacArthur
  25. “A leader should be visionary and have more foresight than an employee.” ~ Jack Ma
  26. “Great leaders do not desire to lead but to serve.” ~ Myles Munroe
  27. “If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, the key is to become a person of quality yourself.” ~ Jim Rohn
  28. “Don’t find fault, find a remedy.” ~ Henry Ford
  29. “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” ~ Winston Churchill
  30. “Integrity, insight, and inclusiveness are the three essential qualities of leadership.” ~ Sadhguru

Great Leaders Quotes

  1. “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” ~ Bill Gates
  2. “No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.” ~ Andrew Carnegie
  3. “Leadership is a choice, not a position.” ~ Stephen Covey
  4. “Integrity is the most valuable and respected quality of leadership. Always keep your word.” ~ Brian Tracy
  5. “Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.” ~ Oprah Winfrey
  6. “Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.” ~ Steve Jobs
  7. Being a good listener is absolutely critical to being a good leader; you have to listen to the people who are on the front line.” ~ Richard Branson
  8.  “Leadership is having a compelling vision, a comprehensive plan, relentless implementation, and talented people working together.” ~ Alan Mulally
  9. “A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.” ~ Zig Ziglar
  10. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” ~ George S. Patton
  11. “Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.” ~ General George Patton
  12. “A leader is a dealer in hope.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
  13. “The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.” ~ Winston Churchill
  14. “To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.” ~ Andre Malraux
  15. “He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.” ~ Aristotle
  16. “Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.” ~ Publilius Syrus
  17. “When I give a minister an order, I leave it to him to find the means to carry it out.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
  18. “The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” ~ Kenneth Blanchard
  19. “A good general not only sees the way to victory; he also knows when victory is impossible.” ~ Polybius
  20. “A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.” ~ John Maxwell

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3 Comments

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