Latin Leadership Quotes

Integrity is the noblest possession. -Latin Proverb.

The first grand federalist design...was that of the Bible, most particularly the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament... Biblical thought is federal (from the Latin foedus, covenant) from first to last--from God's covenant with Noah establishing the biblical equivalent of what philosophers were later to term Natural Law to the Jews' reaffirmation of the Sinai covenant under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, thereby adopting the Torah as the constitution of their second commonwealth. The covenant motif is central to the biblical world view, the basis of all relationships, the mechanism for defining and allocating authority, and the foundation of the biblical political teaching.

Overall there is a “picture of an individual who would be submissive to authority, but not slavishly.” Searching for a term less loaded than “normal” to describe these people, Grinker called them homoclites, a Latinate term he invented to indicate “those who follow a common rule.

The bigger issue is that your character as a person works best when you are “integrated.” In my book Integrity, I talked about how the word integrity comes from the Latin word meaning “whole,” and how business and leadership work best when a person has an integrated or whole character. They are then running on all cylinders and are the same person on the job as they are at home. They are able to use all of their capacities in both places and accomplish their vision.

Obama occasionally pointed out that the post–Cold War moment was always going to be transitory. The rest of the world will accede to American leadership, but not dominance. I remember a snippet from a column around 9/11: America bestrides the world like a colossus. Did we? It was a story we told ourselves. Shock and awe. Regime change. Freedom on the march. A trillion dollars later, we couldn’t keep the electricity running in Baghdad. The Iraq War disturbed other countries—including U.S. allies—in its illogic and destruction, and accelerated a realignment of power and influence that was further advanced by the global financial crisis. By the time Obama took office, a global correction had already taken place. Russia was resisting American influence. China was throwing its weight around. Europeans were untangling a crisis in the Eurozone. Obama didn’t want to disengage from the world; he wanted to engage more. By limiting our military involvement in the Middle East, we’d be in a better position to husband our own resources and assert ourselves in more places, on more issues. To rebuild our economy at home. To help shape the future of the Asia Pacific and manage China’s rise. To open up places like Cuba and expand American influence in Africa and Latin America. To mobilize the world to deal with truly existential threats such as climate change, which is almost never discussed in debates about American national security.

When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule--who is the elite--is never over. For a long time, some people in Europe and North America settled on the idea that various forms of democratic, meritocratic, and economic competition are the fairest alternative to inherited or ordained power. But even in countries that were never occupied by the Red Army and never ruled by Latin American populists, democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. The losers of these competitions were always, sooner or later, going to challenge the value of the competition itself.

It has been noted in various quarters that the half-illiterate Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari never recorded the exact plans or dimensions for how to make one of his famous instruments. This might have been a commercial decision (during the earliest years of the 1700s, Stradivari’s violins were in high demand and open to being copied by other luthiers). But it might also have been because, well, Stradivari didn’t know exactly how to record its dimensions, its weight, and its balance. I mean, he knew how to create a violin with his hands and his fingers but maybe not in figures he kept in his head. Today, those violins, named after the Latinized form of his name, Stradivarius, are considered priceless. It is believed there are only around five hundred of them still in existence, some of which have been submitted to the most intense scientific examination in an attempt to reproduce their extraordinary sound quality. But no one has been able to replicate Stradivari’s craftsmanship. They’ve worked out that he used spruce for the top, willow for the internal blocks and linings, and maple for the back, ribs, and neck. They’ve figured out that he also treated the wood with several types of minerals, including potassium borate, sodium and potassium silicate, as well as a handmade varnish that appears to have been composed of gum arabic, honey, and egg white. But they still can’t replicate a Stradivarius. The genius craftsman never once recorded his technique for posterity. Instead, he passed on his knowledge to a number of his apprentices through what the philosopher Michael Polyani called “elbow learning.” This is the process where a protégé is trained in a new art or skill by sitting at the elbow of a master and by learning the craft through doing it, copying it, not simply by reading about it. The apprentices of the great Stradivari didn’t learn their craft from books or manuals but by sitting at his elbow and feeling the wood as he felt it to assess its length, its balance, and its timbre right there in their fingertips. All the learning happened at his elbow, and all the knowledge was contained in his fingers. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polyani wrote, “Practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action.”1 By that he meant that we learn as Stradivari’s protégés did, by feeling the weight of a piece of wood, not by reading the prescribed measurements in a manual. Polyani continues, To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.

Contrary to popular opinion, then, Christianity is not a Western religion that destroys local cultures. Rather, Christianity has taken more culturally diverse forms than other faiths.25 It has deep layers of insight from the Hebrew, Greek, and European cultures, and over the next hundred years will be further shaped by Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Christianity may become the most truly “catholic vision of the world,”26 having opened its leadership over the centuries to people from every tongue, tribe, people and nation.

The word “introvert” is a combination of two Latin words: intro, meaning inward and vertere, meaning turning.

At this point, it may be of value to revisit the United States involvement in the rise of the “Colonels in Greece” and the Juntas in Latin America. Just after WWII, Britain and the United States intervened in the Greek civil war on behalf of the fascists against the Greek left which had successfully ousted the Nazis from Greece—a formidable feat given that Britain had intervened during WWII against the left-wing guerillas. With the help of Britain and the United States, the fascists prevailed in the post-WWII civil war in Greece and “instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek),”8 just as it had helped create the repressive SAVAK in Iran. The fascist government erected a statue of Harry S. Truman in Athens as thanks for the United States’ role in the coup under his leadership. This statue has been blown up, rebuilt, and blown up again several times. And then, much to the chagrin of both Britain and America, democracy broke out again in Greece—the country which, as we all know, invented democracy—when liberal George Papandreou was elected in 1964. Just before the 1967 elections which Papandreou was sure to win again, a joint effort of Britain, the CIA, Greek Military, KYP and US military stationed in Greece brought about a military coup which brought the fascists back to power. And, as with the Shah in Iran, the new rightist government immediately instituted “martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killing, the victims totaling 8,000 in the first month. … Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.”9 Sound familiar?

The word curriculum originated in the 1600s as a derivative of the Latin word for “course,” specifically a course for a horse or chariot race. That’s a far cry from the stuffy academic flavor the word carries today. Before it was used in formal education, curriculum referred to the necessary stages of development children go through on their way to adulthood. And before it evolved into a rigid syllabus of assignments and tests, a curriculum was a series of tasks and experiences designed to take someone on a journey toward maturity.

But most of us have not had much training in waiting—or at least not enough to prepare us to help others wait in times when they feel highly threatened. Richard Rohr calls this waiting place “liminal space”; liminal comes from the Latin word limina, which means threshold. Liminal space, the place of waiting, is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run . . . anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing. In solitude we learn to wait on God for our own life so that when our leadership brings us to the place where the only option for us as a people is to wait on God, we believe it all the way down to the bottom of our being. Because we have met God in the waiting place (rather than running away or giving in to panic or deceiving ourselves into thinking things are better than they are), we are able to stand firm and believe God in a way that makes it possible for others to follow suit. It is a sobering thing to ask ourselves this question: Have I learned enough about how to wait on God in my own life to be able to call others to wait when that is what’s truly needed? Have I done enough spiritual journeying to lead people on this part of their journey?

Underdevelopment points out the disparity between the rich countries in Europe and North America and countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A trip down history lane tells that the developed nations deeply exploited the developing countries, ultimately leaving them severely crippled. Slavery and colonialism served as the epitome of this exploitation where the Europeans built and developed their economies at the expense of the developing countries. Although we are in the 21st century, the new political, economic, and cultural world order that is powered by globalization perpetrates neocolonialism. Similarly, democracy has had its role in upholding underdevelopment as it involves the conversion of structures, practices, and institutions to resemble those of developed countries. Finally, poor leadership in developing countries contributes as it focuses on leaders amassing wealth. Therefore, developing countries need strong leadership within individual countries and in coalition with others to resists the forces of neocolonialism. Reviewing trade liberalization will allow local firms to flourish. They also need to lobby for more participation in global bodies such as the international monetary fund and the World Bank to make them accountable to underdeveloped communities.

It is, indeed, one of the basic moral blindspots of American conservatism that its intellectual and leadership energy have never been focused in a proactive way on America's racial-caste legacy. This represents a fundamental moral crisis of modern American conservatism.... American conservatives typically ignored the authoritarian and violent racial-caste practices and values arrayed against black Americans in southern states where the vast majority of blacks live. On the other hand, American conservatives have, throughout this century, often embraced freedom movements elsewhere in the world --in Europe, Latin America, East Asia-- but always firmly resisting a proactive embrace of the black American civil rights movement as a bona fide freedom movement fully worthy of their support. So it is in the shadow of this dismal record of mainstream American conservatism vis-a-vis black Americans' long and arduous quest for equality of status that new black conservatives have emerged.

The word ambition comes from a Latin word meaning “campaigning for promotion.” The phrase suggests a variety of elements: social visibility and approval, popularity, peer recognition, the exercise of authority over others. Ambitious people, in this sense, enjoy the power that comes with money, prestige, and authority. Jesus had no time for such ego-driven ambitions. The true spiritual leader will never “campaign for promotion.” To His “ambitious” disciples Jesus announced a new standard of greatness: “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all” (Mark 10:42–44).

I must also underscore the important contribution of Latinas to Hispanic preaching. It is common to see Hispanic women in the púlpito, both in Latin America and in the United States. In part, this is an unlikely by-product of the racism that otherwise tainted missionary endeavors in Latin America and the Caribbean. As missions grew south of the border, missionaries were forced to delegate ministerial duties. Given their initial reticence to entrust pastoral work to locals, male missionaries usually turned to their wives and to single female missionaries. Unwittingly, these women became role models. Church members grew accustomed to female leadership in the local congregation and female presence in the púlpito. This led the second and third generations to appoint women as misioneras (lay preachers) and pastor as (local pastors) even in denominations that traditionally did not ordain women.

Much of modern society has been built upon genocide. This crime was integral to the emergence of the United States, of czarist Russia and later the USSR, of European empires, and of many other states. Today, modern governments continue extermination of indigenous peoples throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, mainly as a means of stealing land and natural resources. Equally pernicious, though often less obvious, the present world order has institutionalized persecution and deprivation of hundreds of millions of children, particularly in the Third World, and in this way kills countless innocents each year.7 These systemic atrocities are for the most part not even regarded as crimes, but instead are written off by most of the world’s media and intellectual leadership as acts of God or of nature whose origin remains a mystery.

The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History by Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz The overwhelmingly non-Hispanic, white leadership of the environmental movement may have felt it was defensible to address population growth as long as the great bulk of this growth came from non-Hispanic whites, which it did during the Baby Boom. But the situation changed dramatically after1972. From that year forward, the fertility of non-Hispanic whites was below the replacement rate, while that of black Americans and Latinos remained well above the replacement rate. To talk of fertility reductions after 1972 was to draw disproportionate attention to nonwhites. Certain minorities and their spokespersons—with long memories of disgraceful treatment by the white majority and acutely aware of their comparative powerlessness in American society—were deeply suspicious of possible hidden agendas in the population stabilization movement. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the Rockefeller Commission, “our community is suspect of any programs that would have the effect of either reducing or levelling off our population growth. Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce.” And Manuel Aragon, speaking in Spanish, declared to the Commission: “what we must do is to encourage large Mexican American families so that we will eventually be so numerous that the system will either respond or it will be overwhelmed.” During the twenty-six years after 1972, the non-Hispanic white share of population growth declined significantly from the 1970 era. Thus, by the 1990s, a majority of the nation’s growth stemmed from sources other than non-Hispanic whites (especially Latin American and Asian immigrants and their offspring). Environmentalist leaders—proud and protective of their claim to the moral high ground—may have been reluctant to jeopardize this by venturing into the political minefield of the nation’s volatile racial/ethnic relations through appearing to point fingers at “outsiders,” “others,” or “people of color” as responsible for America’s ongoing problem with population growth.

Lamentations The book of Lamentations in the English Bible takes its name from the Greek and Latin versions, which translate the Hebrew qinoth “dirges, laments.” The Hebrew Bible names a book by the first word or phrase. Lamentations is one of the “megilloth,” or five scrolls that are read during various of the annual festivals. Lamentations has traditionally been read in observation of Tish b’av (ninth of the month ‘Av), the anniversary of the destruction of Jerusalem. While Tish b’av is a later development, it is a likely extension of the communal mourning over Jerusalem reflected in Jer 41:5; Zec 7:3–5; 8:19. Historical Setting Lamentations focuses on the trauma experienced by the kingdom of Judah at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. In 604 BC Nebuchadnezzar’s military confronted the western states, and Babylonian power was brought to bear on Judah. In less than a decade the devastation of Judah had begun with the first deportation. Typical of ancient Near Eastern warfare, if time permitted, cities fortified as Jerusalem was were often “softened” by siege warfare. This protracted strangulation of a city deprived the defenders and citizenry of food and often of water. Thirst and starvation would decimate the besieged population. Though from an earlier period, the art and inscriptions of the Assyrian palaces provide insight into the horrors of the siege. They also show the intensity of devastation once the defenses were broken down. There was no theory of “separation of church and state” in the ancient Near East. The city-state was viewed as the realm of a patron deity. Palace and temple were intimately connected functionally and were often closely situated physically. One implication of this view is that in order to vanquish a city-state, not only must the military be defeated and the royal court put out of commission (either by killing the king or rendering him unfit to reign—often by mutilation), but the temple and its accoutrements were to be looted and put out of commission. Putting the god under submission was just as important as putting the king and his military under submission. When the kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonian Empire (586 BC), the temple and the palace were destroyed, along with the rest of the capital city, and the leadership and much of the population were carried away captive.

Grinker interviewed them each personally and repeatedly over two years, and gradually assembled a detailed list of ingredients that make for mental health. THE STUDENTS at George Williams College had been active in their local YMCA, and their connections to that organization, their church, and their communities were long and deep. “Uncertainty about the future is minimal,” Grinker noted, among these “upright young men.” They came from white- and blue-collar families in the Midwest. They had slightly above average IQs, average college grades (mostly C’s), and no childhood or adolescent conflicts with their families. Two-thirds said they had been disciplined firmly by their parents, with well-established boundaries for conduct, but they saw these constraints as beneficial and reasonable. Except for four people with abnormal mood states (two with hypomania and two with depression), two stutterers, two people who displayed paranoid thinking, and one person with recurrent nightmares, the great majority (85 percent) lacked even the mildest mental abnormality. Grinker noted that though the subjects enjoyed team sports in high school, “only sometimes did one claim to be the leader of a social, work, or sport group.” These men were better designed to be followers than leaders: “The average subject has had practically no trouble with those in authority” and even “maintains that he would abide by rules which he considered to be unfair.” Overall there is a “picture of an individual who would be submissive to authority, but not slavishly.” Searching for a term less loaded than “normal” to describe these people, Grinker called them homoclites, a Latinate term he invented to indicate “those who follow a common rule.