Colin Powell Quotes
Colin Luther Powell was born on the 5th of April, 1937 in Harlem, New York, United States. Colin Powell is an American politician, diplomat and retired four-star general who served as the 65th United States Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005. Powell is the recipient of numerous U.S. and foreign military awards and decorations.
Colin Powell was the first African American appointed as the U.S. Secretary of State and the first, and so far the only, to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In retirement, Powell wrote his autobiography, My American Journey. He pursued a career as a public speaker, addressing audiences across the country and abroad.
Below, you will find a collection of famous Colin Powell quotes about life, hard work, leadership and success.
80 Colin Powell Quotes About Leadership, Life & Hard Work
A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.– Colin Powell Quotes
Don’t bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.– Colin Powell Quotes
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.– Colin Powell Quotes
If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.– Colin Powell Quotes
Never neglect details. When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.– Colin Powell Quotes
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.– Colin Powell Quotes
There are no secrets to success: don’t waste time looking for them. Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty to those for whom you work, and persistence.– Colin Powell Quotes
Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard.– Colin Powell Quotes
It’s a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.– Colin Powell Quotes
The chief condition on which, life, health and vigor depend on, is action. It is by action that an organism develops its faculties, increases its energy, and attains the fulfillment of its destiny.– Colin Powell Quotes
We need to understand that we as citizens and as a government in any community throughout this country have no more important obligation than to educate those who are going to replace us.– Colin Powell Quotes
The freedom to do your best means nothing unless you are willing to do your best.– Colin Powell Quotes
I always like to take my time and examine the two candidates, see not only the two candidates but the policies they will bring in, the people they will bring in, who they might appoint to the Supreme Court, and look at the whole range of issues before making a decision.– Colin Powell Quotes
The purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced – the just demands of peace and security will be met – or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.– Colin Powell Quotes
Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.– Colin Powell Quotes
You can’t just have slogans, you can’t just have catchy phrases. You have to have an agenda. And I think what the Republican Party has to do, if it’s going to incorporate the tea party efforts in it, is to come up with an agenda that the American people can see, touch, and actually believe in, and something they believe in.– Colin Powell Quotes
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers who can cut through the argument debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.– Colin Powell Quotes
It was the Congress that imposed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ it was certainly my position, my recommendation to get us out of an even worse outcome that could have occurred.– Colin Powell Quotes
You should never be so involved with your position/job that when the position is gone your entire self image is gone with it.– Colin Powell Quotes
Economy’s got to get moving, we’ve got to get the unemployment rate down. That may be the defining issue of the campaign.– Colin Powell Quotes
It takes more courage to send men into battle than to fight the battle yourself.– Colin Powell Quotes
We can seldom get our children to do what we tell them, but they almost never fail to imitate us.– Colin Powell Quotes
I was taught to think about mission and people. Mission. What are you trying to accomplish? Don’t do anything until you know what the mission is. Drilled into our hearts and into our heads.– Colin Powell Quotes
It isn’t enough just to scream at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. We need our political system to start reflect this anger back into, ‘How do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again?’– Colin Powell Quotes
It’s not just a matter of whether you support Obama or Romney. It’s who they have coming with them. I always keep my powder dry, as they say in the military.– Colin Powell Quotes
Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it, spend time with your families.– Colin Powell Quotes
90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world.– Colin Powell Quotes
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life giving speeches.– Colin Powell Quotes
I respect the fact that many denominations have different points of view with respect to gay marriage and they can hold that in the sanctity in the place of their religion and not bless them or solemnize them.– Colin Powell Quotes
There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.– Colin Powell Quotes
We got rid of a terrible dictator. We gave the Iraqi people an opportunity for a new life under a representative form of government.– Colin Powell Quotes
Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.– Colin Powell Quotes
My own experience is use the tools that are out there. Use the digital world. But never lose sight of the need to reach out and talk to other people who don’t share your view. Listen to them and see if you can find a way to compromise.– Colin Powell Quotes
Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.– Colin Powell Quotes
Giving back involves a certain amount of giving up.– Colin Powell Quotes
It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.– Colin Powell Quotes
Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.– Colin Powell Quotes
Experts often possess more data than judgment.– Colin Powell Quotes
Fit no stereotypes. Don’t chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team’s mission.– Colin Powell Quotes
Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.– Colin Powell Quotes
I consider myself a moderate Republican. I have very, very moderate social views, and I’m pretty strong on, on defense matters.– Colin Powell Quotes
I try to be the same person I was yesterday.– Colin Powell Quotes
Look at the world. There is no pure competitor to the United States of America.– Colin Powell Quotes
Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‘Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.’– Colin Powell Quotes
I was born in Harlem, raised in the South Bronx, went to public school, got out of public college, went into the Army, and then I just stuck with it.– Colin Powell Quotes
The United States is not stingy. We are the greatest contributor to international relief efforts in the world.– Colin Powell Quotes
You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.– Colin Powell Quotes
Wouldn’t it be great if we could look forward to a whole world in which no child will be left behind?– Colin Powell Quotes
I think the Iranians are clearly determined to have a nuclear program. And we have to assume that with a nuclear program they have the capability and the will to create a nuclear weapon.– Colin Powell Quotes
In terms of the legal matter of creating a contract between two people that’s called marriage, and allowing them to live together with the protection of law, it seems to me is the way we should be moving in this country.– Colin Powell Quotes
Foe means enemy. Now, will we have differences of opinion with the Russians? Yes. Will they get mad at us from time to time, and we get mad at them? That’s part of the normal diplomatic relations.– Colin Powell Quotes
The ties that bind us are stronger than the occasional stresses that separate us.– Colin Powell Quotes
Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves.– Colin Powell Quotes
I’m not perfect but I’ll be the creator of perfection.– Colin Powell Quotes
A sense of shame is not a bad moral compass.– Colin Powell Quotes
“The day you are not solving problems or are not up to your bu*tt in problems is probably a day you are no longer leading. If your desk is clean and no one is bringing you problems, you should be very worried. It means that people don’t think you can solve them or don’t want to hear about them. Or, far worse, it means they don’t think you care.” – Colin Powell Quotes
“Diplomacy is listening to what the other guy needs. Preserving your own position, but listening to the other guy. You have to develop relationships with other people so when the tough times come, you can work together.” – Colin Powell Quotes
“What could be more important than equipping the next generation with the character and competence they need to become successful.” – Colin Powell Quotes
“Always show more kindness than seems necessary because the person receiving it needs it more than you will ever know.” – Colin Powell Quotes
“It ain’t where you start in life, it’s where you end up, and what you did along the way.” – Colin Powell Quotes
“Always be looking for that which you do well and that which you love doing, and when you find those two things together — man, you got it.” – Colin Powell Quotes
Each of us is a product of all our experiences and all our interactions with other people.– Colin Powell Quotes
Our strategy in going after this army is very simple. First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it.– Colin Powell Quotes
The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.– Colin Powell Quotes
If you get the dirty end of the stick, sharpen it and turn it into a useful tool.– Colin Powell Quotes
The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting above average effort.– Colin Powell Quotes
Keep looking below surface appearances. Don’t shrink from doing so just because you might not like what you find.– Colin Powell Quotes
What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.– Colin Powell Quotes
War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.– Colin Powell Quotes
I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.– Colin Powell Quotes
Perpetual Optimism is a Force Multiplier.– Colin Powell Quotes
It’s nice to say let’s be bipartisan. But we’re a partisan nation. We were raised as a partisan nation.– Colin Powell Quotes
Some of the generals are saying, ‘We’re making progress. We are clearing an area.’ But you really don’t defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move.– Colin Powell Quotes
So like any football or basketball coach, you always always believe you’re going to win.– Colin Powell Quotes
Too often we act – ask our schools to be truant officers, our teachers to be truant officers, because we’re giving them children who have, you know, they’re not ready to learn. And if they’re not ready to learn by the third grade, they know they’re behind.– Colin Powell Quotes
I think whether you’re having setbacks or not, the role of a leader is to always display a winning attitude.– Colin Powell Quotes
Today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place.– Colin Powell Quotes
In other words, don’t expect to always be great. Disappointments, failures and setbacks are a normal part of the lifecycle of a unit or a company and what the leader has to do is constantly be up and say ‘we have a problem, let’s go and get it’.– Colin Powell Quotes
But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you’ve got to compromise. You’ve got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.– Colin Powell Quotes
If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.– Colin Powell Quotes