1. “Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

John Lewis was born to sharecroppers near Troy, Alabama, in 1940, and he spent his life being told to stay out of trouble. Instead he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, became the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington at 23, helped lead the Selma to Montgomery marches, and was arrested more than forty times before he was ever elected to anything. He went on to serve seventeen terms in Congress and died on 17 July 2020 at the age of 80. This line is from a 2018 statement in which he told supporters not to get lost in a sea of despair, because the struggle is the struggle of a lifetime — and then gave them the instruction that defines him. “Good trouble” is not recklessness. It is the deliberate choice to accept a cost — a night in jail, a beating, a backlash — because the cause is right and staying quiet would make you complicit. Lewis is describing leadership as a willingness to be inconvenient. The people who change institutions are rarely the ones who follow the rules comfortably; they are the ones who decide that some rules deserve to be broken loudly, and then accept what comes next.

— John Lewis, in a 2018 message to supporters

2. “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg said this at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on 29 May 2015, when she was 82 years old and had been on the Supreme Court for more than two decades. She had just been awarded the Radcliffe Medal, and she was asked what advice she would give young women. Her answer is a two-part instruction, and the second half is the harder one. Anyone can fight for a cause; the test of leadership is whether the fight attracts or repels. Ginsburg spent the 1970s as an ACLU lawyer winning cases that struck down laws built on what she called “separate spheres for the sexes,” and she won them by persuading courts and colleagues rather than by humiliating opponents. She served on the Supreme Court from 1993 until her death in September 2020, and she was only the second woman ever to sit there. The line captures her method exactly. A cause with one fighter dies with that fighter; a cause that recruits is a cause that outlives you.

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, accepting the Radcliffe Medal at Harvard University (29 May 2015)

3. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Barack Obama delivered these lines on 5 February 2008, in a speech to supporters as the Super Tuesday primary results came in, more than nine months before he was elected the 44th president of the United States. Read it again and notice what it is not promising. It is not a promise of rescue, and it is not a promise that history will do the work on its own. It is a transfer of responsibility from the leader to the crowd — the opposite of what a politician normally does. Obama is saying that the waiting itself is the problem: the belief that some other person, at some other time, will finally fix things. Leadership, in this framing, begins with the moment a group stops waiting and starts acting. It is the same insight John Lewis reached from the front lines and Ginsburg reached from the bench, said in the language of a campaign. The person you have been waiting for is the person reading the sentence.

— Barack Obama, speech after the Super Tuesday primaries (5 February 2008)

4. “You can be both empathetic and strong.”

Jacinda Ardern became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017, at 37 the country’s youngest leader in more than 150 years and only its third woman. She made this argument in a 2020 interview published in The Guardian, and it was a direct answer to a criticism she had faced her entire time in office: that a leader who leads with kindness must somehow be weak. Her response was to reject the premise. Political leadership, she said, had placed so much emphasis on assertiveness and strength that we had started to assume you could not also be kind — and yet kindness was the quality the biggest problems actually required. Her record supplied the argument. After the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, which killed 51 people, she responded with empathy toward the victims’ families and, within a month, pushed through a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons that passed 119 votes to one. Empathy, on her account, is not the soft alternative to strength. It is a form of strength that happens to face outward.

— Jacinda Ardern, in a 2020 interview published in The Guardian

5. “Leadership is about making other people better as a result of your presence — and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”

This sentence comes from Uncommon Service (2012), by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, and it is one of the most useful corrections in the whole leadership genre. Frei is the UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management at Harvard Business School and served as Uber’s first senior vice president of leadership and strategy, where she was brought in to help rebuild a workplace culture in crisis. Her definition moves the entire point of leadership away from the leader. The question is not how impressive you are in the room; it is what the people around you can do because you were there, and what they can still do after you leave. That second clause is the hard test, because it rules out leadership that depends on being needed. If everything collapses the moment you step away, you were not leading — you were holding. It is worth adding an honest note here: this line is very often attributed to Sheryl Sandberg online, but the source is Frei and Morriss. Getting the credit right matters, and so does the idea underneath it.

— Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, Uncommon Service (2012)

6. “We realise the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.”

Malala Yousafzai was born in Pakistan’s Swat Valley on 12 July 1997 and began writing about her right to go to school when she was still a child. On 9 October 2012, at 15, she was shot by the Taliban on her way home from school. She survived, kept speaking, and in 2014 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at 17 — the youngest person ever to receive it. This line appears in I Am Malala, the memoir she published in 2013, and it explains why she refused to be quiet after the attack. Most of us treat our voice as a background fact, like air, until it is taken away; only then do we feel what it was worth. That is why her example is a lesson in leadership and not merely in courage. She did not speak only for herself. In her Nobel lecture she said the award was not just for her but for the forgotten children who want education and the voiceless children who want change. Leadership, for her, meant using a voice that others did not have — and treating that as an obligation rather than an achievement.

— Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala (2013)

7. “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

Ginsburg said this in the 2018 documentary Notorious RBG, describing the strategy behind the cases she argued across the 1970s. It is the least glamorous sentence in this collection and probably the most practical one. Ginsburg did not try to overturn America’s gender order with a single sweeping decision; she built a sequence of narrow, carefully chosen cases, each one establishing a principle the next could stand on, until the cumulative weight made the old rules impossible to defend. That patience looks like slowness, and impatient people often mistake it for timidity. But it is the opposite: it is leadership with a long time horizon, the willingness to accept that you may not get the credit or even live to see the result. One step at a time is a hard discipline, because every step is unglamorous on its own. It is also the only way large things actually change.

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in the documentary Notorious RBG (2018)

8. “Empathy is nothing without action.”

Ardern returned to this theme in 2026, speaking at the All About Women event at the Sydney Opera House, and it closes the collection for a reason. The previous seven quotes are about going first, recruiting others, building people up, and refusing to wait. This one supplies the missing test. Empathy — the feeling that you understand someone’s pain — is cheap and easy to perform, and it costs nothing to announce. Ardern’s point is that a leader who says “I feel your pain” without changing anything has produced a sentiment, not a result. She has argued consistently since leaving office in 2023, including in her memoir A Different Kind of Power, that compassionate leadership is not a posture but a practice, and that its proof is always concrete: a law passed, a person protected, a wrong made less likely. Put the eight lines together and they converge on one conclusion. Leadership is not the title you hold or the feeling you express. It is what you do, and what the people around you can do afterward, that did not happen before.

— Jacinda Ardern, speaking at the Sydney Opera House (2026)

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