Colin Powell

Statesman

1937-04-05

Quotes by Colin Powell

• Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.

  Read quote

• Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.

  Read quote

• You don't know what you can get away with until you try.

  Read quote

• The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

  Read quote

• There are no secrets to success: don't waste time looking for them. Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty to those for whom you work, and persistence.

  Read quote

• Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.

  Read quote

• You don't know what you can get away with until you try.

  Read quote

• There are no secrets to success: don't waste time looking for them. Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty to those for whom you work, and persistence.

  Read quote

• Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.

  Read quote

• The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

  Read quote

• It isn't enough just to scream at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. We need our political system to start reflect this anger back into, 'How do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again?'

  Read quote

• Get mad, then get over it.

  Read quote

• Don't bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.

  Read quote

• Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.

  Read quote

• In 2008, I spoke out against calling the president a Muslim as if that was a curse. And then in 2012, once again, I was very disturbed about some of the intolerance I was seeing in the party, so I made a statement saying there's a level of intolerance in some parts of the Republican Party. And there was, and I think there still is.

  Read quote

• The United States is not stingy. We are the greatest contributor to international relief efforts in the world.

  Read quote

• Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.

  Read quote

• You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.

  Read quote

• When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

  Read quote

• We all hoped in 2001 that we could put in place an Afghan government under President Karzai that would be able to control the country, make sure al-Qaeda didn't come back, and make sure the Taliban wasn't resurging. It didn't work out.

  Read quote