Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes on Leadership
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'All right,' Miles pulled Suegar to his feet, 'let's go preach to the unconverted.'
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Men may move mountains, but ideas move men.
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The loonies who sought a glorious death in battle found it very early on. This rapidly cleared the chain of command of the accumulated fools. The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win, and win, and win, and for whom nothing, not comfort, or security, not family for friends for their immortal souls, was more important than winning. Dead men are losers by definition. Survival and victory. They weren't supermen, or immune to pain. They sweated in confusion and darkness. And ... they won.
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You can't give power away and keep it simultaneously. Except posthumously.
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It is always easier to get forgiveness than permission
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Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work.
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If it ever came down to exerting power by force, it would mean I'd already lost it.
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I could take over the universe with this army if I could ever get all their weapons pointed in the same direction.
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The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real.
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We don't just march on the future, we charge it.
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When a normal ensign looked at his commander, he ought to see a godlike being, not a, a... future subordinate. New ensigns were supposed to be a subhuman species anyway.
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Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and materials to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival--to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory--organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.