Presentation Hacks

50 Inspirational Leadership Quotes

By: Leslie Belknap

50 Inspirational Leadership Quotes

Every time you stand in front of an audience to deliver a presentation, you are a leader. The ideas, stories, and actions you share with the audience during your presentation will potentially alter the life of every audience member in a significant way. The leadership aspect of presentations is gift that is given to you as a public speaker, however how you use your position of power is up to you. Just because you are seen as a leader when you walk on the stage does not mean you will be viewed as an effective or admirable leader when you walk off the stage.

To help you take advantage of the leadership position you are granted as a presenter, here are a few inspirational quotes about leadership to help guide you as you prepare your presentation.

1. Every time you have to speak, you are auditioning for leadership.

— James Humes

2. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

— Steve Jobs

3. Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.

— Henry Ford

4. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

— John Quincy Adams

5. Life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent of how I react to it.

— Charles Swindoll

6. I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.

— Mother Teresa

7. A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others see.

— Leroy Eimes

8. A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

9. Control your own destiny or someone else will.

— Jack Welch

10. To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

11. Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.

— George Addair

12. 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

13. A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

— George Patton

14. Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.

— Farrah Gray

15. Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

16. Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.

— Colin Powell

17. Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.

— Bill Bradley

18. It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.

— Nelson Mandela

19. 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

20. In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

— Thomas Jefferson

21. If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.

— Vincent Van Gogh

22. There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

— Edith Wharton

23. There are three essentials to leadership: humility, clarity and courage.

— Fuchan Yuan

24. To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way.

— Pat Riley

25. Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

26. Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.

— Tom Peters

27. No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.

— Andrew Carnegie

28. One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.

— Arnold Glasow

29. 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

30. The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.

— Ray Kroc

31. The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them.

— Carlos Ghosn

32. Don’t find fault, find a remedy.

— Henry Ford

33. Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

— Peter Drucker

34. Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.

— Deepak Chopra

35. 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

36. When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

— Helen Keller

37. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

— Leonardo da Vinci

38. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

— Albert Einstein

39. Earn your leadership every day.

— Michael Jordan

40. To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

41. The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.

— Harvey Firestone

42. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

— Dalai Lama

43. Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

— Stephen Covey

44. A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men.

— Stephen King

45. The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

— Amelia Earhart

46. Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

— Albert Einstein

47. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

— Michael Jordan

48. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

— Mark Twain

49. Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.

— Les Brown

50. Do or do not. There is no try.

— Yoda