John McCain

I don’t mind a good fight. For reasons known only to God, I’ve had quite a few tough ones in my life. But I learned an important lesson along the way: In the end, it matters less that you can fight. What you fight for is the real test.

If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.

Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood

Sometimes it’s important to watch what the president does rather than what he says.

America’s greatest strength has always been its hopeful vision of human progress.

The first role of government is to help people who are in crisis or need. That’s why we have government.

I think people should be nicer to each other

I judge people based on their capability, honesty, and merit.

The very essence of leadership is having vision.

You will launch many projects, but have time to finish only a few. So think, plan, develop, launch and tap good people to be responsible. Give them authority and hold them accountable. Trying to do too much yourself creates a bottleneck.

As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.

Don’t blame the boss. He has enough problems.

You do your job, you keep your job. Do it well, you get a better job.

Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.

Even as entrepreneurs, we rely on people to get things done. We may have the original idea, but moving it forward can involve hundreds of people. Every person becomes integral to the overall success.

Leaders, true leaders, take responsibility for the success of the team, and understand that they must also take responsibility for the failure.

Respect people with less power then you. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room, I will judge you on how you treat the least powerful. So there.

The challenge of leadership is to create change and facilitate growth.

I feel like the thing we can do is celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world. So when the next economic crisis hits and people are talking about where to cut from the budget, science isn’t the thing.

Rule a kingdom as though you were cooking a small fish – don’t overdo it.

Leaders who are effective are leaders who are disciplined in their daily lives.