Great necessities call forth great leaders.

 

Great necessities call forth great leaders.
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This seems to first appear in Why Leaders Can't Lead : The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues (1989) by Warren G. Bennis, p. 159, where it is cited as being from a letter to Thomas Jefferson, but it might be a misquote of "Great necessities call out great virtues" stated in a letter to her son John Quincy Adams (19 January 1780).

 

Abigail Adams

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These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

 

Abigail Adams

 

We all know that great leaders can create great successes...success for the Chicago public education fund is to bring great leaders into Chicago's public schools.

 

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I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

 

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Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.

 

Steve Wozniak

 

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.

 

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