James Stockdale Quotes

• Leadership must be based on goodwill. Goodwill does not mean posturing and, least of all, pandering to the mob. It means obvious and wholehearted commitment to helping followers.

  James Stockdale

  Mean, Commitment, Doe

  60 Copy quote

• The challenge of education is not to prepare a person for success, but to prepare him for failure.

  James Stockdale

  Success, Education, Failure

  72 Copy quote

• It is in disaster, not success, that the heros and the bums really get sorted out.

  James Stockdale

  Hero, Disaster

  30 Copy quote

• Great leaders gain authority by giving it away.

  James Stockdale

  Giving, Leader, Gains

  43 Copy quote

• Do the right thing even if it means dying like a dog when no one's there to see you do it.

  James Stockdale

  Dog, Mean, Dying

  36 Copy quote

• I think character is permanent, and issues are transient.

  James Stockdale

  Character, Thinking, Issues

  27 Copy quote

• A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.

  James Stockdale

  Education, Ideas, Curiosity

  38 Copy quote

• The worst thing that can happen is death, and that's not the worst thing in the world either.

  James Stockdale

  World, Worst, Happens

  "Prisoner of War in North Vietnam". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. July 28, 2001.

  20 Copy quote

• Entitlement and privelege corrupt.

  James Stockdale

  Character, Entitlement

  20 Copy quote

• I was tortured fifteen times, thats total submission. They did that with shutting off your blood circulation with ropes, giving you claustrophobia and pain at the same time, bending you double.

  James Stockdale

  Pain, Blood, Giving

  73 Copy quote

• I never had a single conversation about politics with Ross Perot in my life; still haven't.

  James Stockdale

  Single Life, Politics, Conversation

  15 Copy quote

• He's a novice, but he's had these - he's experienced in leadership in tight circumstances. He started - he dropped the first bomb, led the first air strike into North Vietnam.

  James Stockdale

  Leadership, Air, Vietnam

  13 Copy quote

• I mean, I didn't - I should have demanded attention of the boss maybe, or something like that that might have backfired. This I would just take as it came.

  James Stockdale

  Mean, Should Have, Boss

  11 Copy quote

• The guy that just arranges things so that the stock market holds up is nobody in my - in my estimation

  James Stockdale

  Guy, Estimation

  11 Copy quote

• They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

  James Stockdale

  History, Rhyming, Physics

  9 Copy quote

• Well, first of all, I was asked by Ross Perot on a telephone call in March of 1992 if, since he had committed on the Larry King Show to becoming a candidate for president, to get on all 50 ballots

  James Stockdale

  Kings, President, Telephones

  10 Copy quote

• I'm a grown man. You know, I've been in a lot of scrapes, but I never felt like I got so - there are probably a lot of things I should have done that I didn't do.

  James Stockdale

  Men, Should Have, Done

  11 Copy quote

• On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.

  James Stockdale

  Air, Railroads, Bombs

  12 Copy quote

• I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, F-8 Crusaders.

  James Stockdale

  Fighter, Officers

  7 Copy quote

• Half the issues they - are so polished they're talking about - are dead by the time they get into the office, and into the midst of their tour where they're really productive.

  James Stockdale

  Journey, Talking, Issues

  9 Copy quote

• This idea, as you know, that I have firm convictions that the idea of issues being a big deal where our mutual friend went back and he felt so strongly that the determining factor in electoral success should be a proven character.

  James Stockdale

  Character, Ideas, Issues

  7 Copy quote

• Yeah. I mean, it just seemed to me that it was - I felt so helpless to this business of not having any papers. That seems like a throwback to a schoolboy.

  James Stockdale

  Mean Girls, Paper, Yeah

  60 Copy quote

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