Leadership is an art. Not everyone is a born leader. However, we can learn and grow to become good leaders. On our way though, we constantly need inspiration and guidance. What best than learning from the best leaders. This is a curated list of the best quotes about leadership from world’s best leaders to motivate and guide us.

Leadership Quotes

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. (Jack Welch)

A leader is a dealer in hope. (Napoleon Bonaparte)

The best leaders have a high consideration factor. They really care about their people. (Brian Tracy)

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Leadership is hard to define, and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader. – Indra Nooyi

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When people talk, listen completely. (Ernest Hemingway)

Leaders don’t inflict pain, they share pain. (Max Depree)

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence, and making sure that impact lasts in your absence. (Sheryl Sandberg)

He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander. (Aristotle)

Do not be afraid to make decisions. Do not be afraid to make mistakes. (Carly Fiorina)

Integrity Is The Most Valuable And Respected Quality Of Leadership. Always Keep Your Word. (Brian Tracy)

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The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. – Theodore Roosevelt

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Quotes for Aspiring Leaders

This section of “Best Quotes About Leadership” has 11 inspirational quotes for all aspiring leaders.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. (Steve Jobs)

Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better. (Bill Bradley)

A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit. (Arnold H. Glasgow)

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd. (Max Lucado)

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)

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)

The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes. (Tony Blair)

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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

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You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader. (Henry Ford)

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)

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Quotes about empathy in leadership

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)

The value that I really learned to appreciate deeply and which I talk about a great deal is empathy. I don’t think it is simply a “nice to have” but I believe it is at the centre of the agenda for innovation here at Microsoft. (Satya Nadella)

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As a leader, you should always start with where people are before you try to take them where you want them to go.
– Jim Rohn

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The successful agencies of the future will be those that integrate technological excellence with profoundly human qualities: combining efficacy with empathy… I suspect that we’ll need appetite and empathy more than ever. (Jim Carroll)

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. (Leo Buscaglia)

Empathy. It’s one of the biggest things to which I attribute my success. It’s the reason I believe that I am one of the great salespeople out there. (Gary Vaynerchuk)

Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration – of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine. (Lance Secretan)

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Remote Work Quotes from Top Business Leaders

People are more productive working at home than people would have expected. Some people thought that everything was just going to fall apart, and it hasn’t. (Mark Zuckerberg)

It is about workplace flexibility. It’s about giving our associates the opportunity to be who they are as an individual, whether that is a community member, a spouse or parent, or anything in between. (Amy Freshman)

Do you want to access talent everywhere, or just in specific markets? If the answer is everywhere, you need to be at least open to the possibility of remote work. (Katie Burke)

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“One of the secret benefits of using remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance.” – Jason Fried

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Now that companies have built the framework – and experienced the cost and time savings associated with it – there’s no real reason to turn back. (Mark Lobosco)

I can’t tell you the number of CEOs I talked to who are thinking, ‘I have to solve the diversity challenge in my business, and remote work is one of the key tools… We have to let go of this very office-centric culture and incorporate people who are in a lot of geographies. (Hayden Brown, CEO of Upwork)

Even if remote work turns out to be less productive on some metrics than others, reducing carbon-based emissions or the improving work-life balance could make up for it. (Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz, Harvard Business Review)

Success in a hybrid work environment requires employers to move beyond viewing remote or hybrid environments as a temporary or short-term strategy and to treat it as an opportunity. (George Penn, VP at Gartner)

Part of the beauty of remote work is being able to work on a schedule that works best for you, but if you’re online and working at all hours, you’ll start burning out quickly. We’ll need to build clear rules around how technology can be used to help us maintain those boundaries for work-life balance. (Ryan Bonnici)

The key to culture is how you build relationships. It’s about the quality and types of conversations you have, not where you have them. (Larry English)

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Famous Quotes from Women Leaders

My best successes came on the heels of failures. (Barbara Corcoran)

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. (Anais Nin)

If you’re not making some notable mistakes along the way, you’re certainly not taking enough business and career chances. – Sallie Krawcheck (CEO & Co-Founder, Ellevest)

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, “She doesn’t have what it takes.” They will say, “Women don’t have what it takes. (Clare Boothe Luce)

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be. (Elizabeth Gilbert)

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Leadership should be more participative than directive, more enabling than performing. – Mary D. Poole (Author)

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With kids, they don’t do what you want them to do when you want them to do it. Organizations don’t necessarily, either. You’ve got to listen. You’ve got to learn how to influence. – Ellen J. Kullman (President & CEO, Carbon)

Define success on your own terms, achieve it by your own rules, and build a life you’re proud to live. – Anne Sweeney (Former President, Disney ABC Television Group)

If you want to lift the performance of the organization, you have to lift yourself…my message to my team was always meet my bar, and that bar would constantly be moved up.” (Indra Nooyi)

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Everyone gets knocked down in life. What matters is whether you get back up and keep going. (It’s a) lesson drilled in from an early age by my mother. It’s served me well and it’s universal. (Hillary Clinton)

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Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg)

Diversity and Inclusion Leadership Quotes

We are all different, which is great because we are all unique. Without diversity, life would be very boring. (Catherine Pulsifer)

When we listen and celebrate what is both common and different, we become wiser, more inclusive, and better as an organization. (Pat Wadors)

We are building products that people with very diverse backgrounds use, and I think we all want our company makeup to reflect the makeup of the people who use our products. (Sheryl Sandberg)

We have a very diverse environment and a very inclusive culture, and those characteristics got us through the tough times. Diversity generated a better strategy, better risk management, better debates, and better outcomes. (Alan Joyce)

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Inclusivity means not ‘just we’re allowed to be there,’ but we are valued. I’ve always said: smart teams will do amazing things, but truly diverse teams will do impossible things. (Claudia Brind-Woody)

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It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity, there is beauty, and there is strength. (Maya Angelou)

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization. (Mahatma Gandhi)

We all want something to offer. This is how we belong. It’s how we feel included. So if we want to include everyone, we have to help everyone develop their talents and use their gifts for the good of the community. That’s what inclusion means – everyone is a contributes. (Melinda Gates)

Many conversations about diversity and inclusion do not happen in the boardroom because people are embarrassed at using unfamiliar words or afraid of saying the wrong thing — yet this is the very place we need to be talking about it. The business case speaks for itself — diverse teams are more innovative and successful in going after new markets (Inga Beale)

What’s often ignored is that diversity is not only a pipeline or recruiting issue. It’s an issue of making the people who do make it through the pipeline want to stay at your company. (Andrea Barrica)

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Quotes about human capital from top leaders

Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to. (Sir Richard Branson)

I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies. (Lawrence Bossidy)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead)

Great vision without great people is irrelevant. (Jim Collins)

In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you’re going to be 20 years from now is how well you’re doing in your education system. (Bill Gates)

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You cannot mandate productivity. You must provide the tools to let people become their best. (Steve Jobs)

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Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. (Ken Robinson)

Employees aren’t inanimate objects that can just be moved around like bricks. They’re people with emotions and goals and commitments and more. They should be treated like stakeholders, because they are. (Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.)

Employee engagement isn’t just an “HR thing” – it’s a finance, accounting and valuation thing. (Dave Bookbinder)

But there is a golden rule to hiring that cannot be violated: the urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring. In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail. (Eric Schmidt)

Human capital will go where it is wanted, and it will stay where it is well treated. It cannot be driven; it can only be attracted. (Walter Wriston)

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