High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

No one can give you better advice than yourself.

I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else – I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.

Ultimately this issue is on us. We’re the ones who make the decisions about what our kids eat.

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I, therefore, intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

Decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.

If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, ‚No.‘

As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

I only see clearly what I remember.

If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.

To the women and children, T stands for tender. To the bad guys and thugs, it stands for tough.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. A word of encouragement from a spouse can save a marriage. A word of encouragement from a leader can inspire a person to reach her potential.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

If you continue to keep low performers on your team, that are actually dragging the team down; you’re failing the whole team, and eventually, the whole team is going to fail.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

If you want to be a good strategist, you can never just go off a principle you read in a book. You need to adapt what you do to the situation; no rule of thumb is true all the time.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.

I had to make a choice at one point in my life, of missing films or missing my children. It was a very easy decision to make because I missed my children so very much.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants.

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.

Gray Davis can run a dirty campaign better than anyone, but he can’t run a state.

One of the things that was really an issue was I did not want to just be a woman secretary of state. I wanted to be a secretary of a state who was a woman, but not just chosen for that particular reason.

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

I think I was identified as a failed president because I wasn’t re-elected.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

All my life, whenever it comes time to make a decision, I make it and forget about it.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.

What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs?

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

You cannot be President of the United States if you don’t have faith. Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial in the Civil War and all that stuff.

The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.