Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
If you don’t respect others, you’re not doing it right. I try always
to let my great respect show through for people who try hard to do
the right thing. And sure enough, they do try, in almost every case.
The others, who are perhaps trying in some way I don’t understand…
I Respect them too… and wish them success elsewhere.
Every once in a while, I manage to say something that resonates with people. They come up to me some time later or send me email and riff on how what I said inspired them in some way. Here are a few of the phrases that people accuse me of having uttered that they’ve felt compelled to comment on.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
OLMSTEAD v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928)
Mr. Justice BRANDEIS (dissenting)
Evelyn Rowser [fictional character] had an expression for the few seconds before the curtain went up. She called it the holy time. But you don’t have to be an actor to know what the holy time feels like. It’s that breath you take just seconds before you become the person you were meant to become. For some people, it feels like forever. And for some, it’s a moment over far too fast.
— Irv, narrator of the closing of Everwood, Season 1 Episode 13