James MacGregor Burns famous quotes

06-23-2025

Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation's conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Self #People #Leader
In real life, the most practical advice for leaders is not to treat pawns like pawns, nor princes like princes, but all persons like persons.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Relationship #Real #Advice
The ultimate test of practical leadership is the realization of intended, real change that meets people's enduring needs.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Change #Real #People
Let us face reality. The framers (of the Constitution) have simply been too shrewd for us. They have outwitted us. They designed separate institutions that cannot be unified by mechanical linkages frail bridges(or) tinkering. If we are to turn the founders upside down we must directly confront the Constitutional structure they erected.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Reality #Bridges #Tinkering
Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Technique #Ethics #Management
A revolution is an act of violence whereby one class shatters the authority of another.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Class #Violence #Revolution
Such leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Motivation #Leader #Followers
Leadership, in short, is power governed by principle, directed toward raising people to their highest levels of personal motive and social morality,
-- James MacGregor Burns

#People #Principles #Levels
Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Earth #Understood
Those who remember only that the Roosevelts served hot dogs to the royals will be fascinated by this well-researched account of an historic and ennobling relationship - a great story!
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Dog #Hot #Stories
Leaders are not pale reflectors of major social conflicts; they play up some, play down others, ignore still others.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Play #Leader #Conflict
To elevate the goals of humankind, to achieve high moral purpose, to realize major intended change, leaders must thrust themselves into the most intractable processes and structures of history and ultimately master them.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Goal #Leader #Purpose
The practice of leadership is not the same as the exercise of power.
-- James MacGregor Burns

#Exercise #Practice

You may also like:

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Historian
Chip Heath
Author
Dan Heath
Author
Edgar Schein
Franklin D. Roosevelt
32nd U.S. President
George Washington
1st U.S. President
John P. Kotter
Author
John W. Gardner
Author
Ken Burns
Producer
Margaret J. Wheatley
Writer
Michael Beschloss
Historian
Peter Drucker
Author
Robert E. Quinn
Former Governor of Rhode Island
Robert K. Greenleaf
Robert S. Jepson, Jr.
Ronald A. Heifetz
Theodore Roosevelt
26th U.S. President
Thomas Jefferson
3rd U.S. President
Warren G. Bennis
Author
William J. Clinton
42nd U.S. President