This document contains a collection of quotes on various topics including leadership, life, and important matters. Some of the quotes discuss the challenges of leadership, the importance of strategy, and the need for continual change and improvement. The quotes reflect on both positive and negative aspects of human nature and society.

1. Perspectives on Life, Leadership, and Other Important Matters Assembled by Carl L. Harshman

2. Twenty percent of the people will be against anything. -Robert Kennedy US Attorney General

3. The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided . -Casey Stengel

4. This taught me a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is. -John McEnroe on losing to Tim Mayotte in the Ebel US Pro Indoor Championships

5. They spend their time mostly looking forward to the past. -John Osborn Look Back in Anger

7. You’re telling us that the reason things are so bad is that they are so good, and they will get better as soon as they get worse? -John Sununu (then governor of New Hampshire) You got it. -James A. Baker (then Secretary of the Treasury)

8. The people who change best and fastest are the ones who have no choice. -Robert Frey Harvard Business Review

9. Don’t forget, folks. . . the less you bet, the more you lose when you win. -advice from a stickman at the Landmark Casino, Las Vegas (now closed)

10. Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to. -Ashleigh Brilliant

11. Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before. -Dwight D. Eisenhower

12. Never become irritable waiting for things to get better. If you’ll be patient, you’ll find that you can wait much faster. -Unknown

13. Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known. -Garrison Keillor

14. We hire people for their skills, but the whole person shows up for work. -Chester I. Barnard

15. According to all major studies of mergers we have seen, failures have much more to do with lacking the soft skills-leadership and change management. Rarely do failures result because hard business skills are lacking. Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger The Leadership Machine

16. In commenting on the various approaches to understanding the process of leadership as well as the traits and behaviors of leaders, Warren Bennis, leadership guru said: “ Never have so many labored so long to say so little.”

17. If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong. -Charles Kettering

18. Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof. -John Kenneth Galbraith

19. Things will get better . . . despite our efforts to improve them. -Will Rogers

20. The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. -Oscar Wilde

21. More than anytime in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly . -Woody Allen

22. Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. -Jonathan Kozol

23. As you’re the only one you can really change, the only one who can really use all your good advice is yourself. -John-Roger and Peter McWilliams

24. The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we’re ready for it. -Arnold H. Glasow

25. Convincing yourself that a bad idea is a good idea is a bad idea. -Texas Bix Bender

26. Our problems are mostly behind us . . . what we have to do now is fight the solutions. -Stult’s Situation Report The Chicago Tribune July 11, 1975

27. You think you understand the situation, but what you don’t understand is that the situation just changed. -Putnam Investments advertisement

28. The certainty of misery is better than the misery of uncertainty. -Pogo

29. It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back. -Vice President Dan Quayle (You may want to read it again.)

30. The person who does not apply new remedies must expect new evils. -Francis Bacon English Philosopher

31. The person at the top of the mountain didn’t just fall there! -Anonymous

32. Success or failure is caused more by mental attitude than by mental capacity. -Sir Walter Scott

33. Never have we had so little time in which to do so much! -Franklin D. Roosevelt

34. Strategy without Leadership goes nowhere; Leadership without Strategy has nowhere to go. C. L. Harshman

35. “ A leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it.” -Harry Truman

36. "The ship he commanded was running deeper and deeper into an enveloping fog of lies told by functionaries whose careers would be destroyed by the truth." Tom Clancy The Cardinal of the Kremlin

37. Like values, the search for the definitive solution to leadership problems has proved to be another endless quest for the Holy Grail in organization theory. Charles Handy

38. . . . the higher one is in the hierarchy, the less appropriate authoritarian behaviors become in gaining the loyalty and dedication of independent-thinking and talented people. Management Research Group Leadership Effectiveness Analysis “ Developing Followership”

39. We’re all in this alone. -Lily Tomlin

40. “ There are many leaders, not just one. Leadership is distributed. It resides not solely in the individual at the top, but in every person at every level who, in one way or another, acts as a leader to a group of followers— wherever in the organization that person is, whether shop steward, team head, or CEO.” Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee

41. Assembled by: Dr. Carl L Harshman www.iwaminstitute.com www.harshman.com