15 Mahatma Gandhi Quotes on Leadership

Mahatma Gandhi quotes on leadership

3. 'My life is my message'

70. Without infinite patience it is impossible to get the people to do any work.

74. Public worker should not accept no costly gifts.

96. He who would go in for novel experiments must begin with himself.

113. Service without humility is selfishness and egotism.

122. Those who want to lead the people to satyagraha ought to be able to keep the people within the limited non-violence expected of them.

127. A reformer cannot afford to have close intimacy with him whom he seeks to reform.

207. Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.

237. Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of the truth.

248. Why change the world when we can change ourselves?

255. If you want to give a message again to the West, it must be a message of 'Love', it must be a message of 'Truth'. There must be a conquest [claps], please, please, please. That will interfere with my speech, and that will interfere with your understanding also. I want to capture your hearts and don't want to receive your claps. Let your hearts clap in unison with what I'm saying, and I think, I shall have finished my work. Therefore, I want you to go away with the thought that Asia has to conquer the West. Then, the question that a friend asked yesterday, 'Did I believe in one world?' Of course, I believe in one world. And how can I possibly do otherwise, when I become an inheritor of the message of love that these great un-conquerable teachers left for us? (One World - april 2, 1947 - New Delhi)

257. It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.

260. Everyone concerned in the better future of mankind must be deeply moved by the tragic death of Mahatma Gandhi. He died as the victim of his own principles, the principle of nonviolence. He died because in time of disorder and general irritation in his country, he refused armed protection for himself. It was his unshakable belief that the use of force is an evil in itself, that therefore it must be avoided by those who are striving for supreme justice to his belief. With his belief in his heart and mind, he has led a great nation on to its liberation. He has demonstrated that a powerful human following can be assembled not only through the cunning game of the usual political manoeuvres and trickeries but through the cogent example of morally superior conduct of life.

261. A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back -- but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

263. I could find no explanation worthy of the Mahatma for his decision to accept leadership of the khilafat movement. The decision, it seemed to me, revealed the great man's proverbial Achilles' heel.