I’d never heard of Gerald W. Johnson when I came across this excellent quote, “The closed mind, if closed long enough, can be opened by nothing short of dynamite.”

It was so perfectly aimed, so true and so applicable that I went looking for what else he said.
There’s not a lot, but you’ll love what I did find. Johnson’s comments seem especially pithy and apropos for our world today.

Consider this, “No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility.” These days, the higher you go the harder it is to find anyone who has been saddled.

Of course, give it a few years—the economy will recover, the jail sentences will be over, and all those leaders who wouldn’t know a responsibility if it jumped up and bit them will be back taking risks and influencing right and left. This will happen because, as Johnson said, “Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.” Or what they choose to remember.

Heroes aren’t really in style these days, so I thought I’d bring the final quote up to date.

“Heroes Leaders are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials.”

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 1:30 am and is filed under About Leadership, Quotable Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: accountability, responsibility
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