In this post, we’ll read some of the best Colin Powell quotes who was an American military leader, statesman, and diplomat.
Colin Powell (1937–2021) was born in Harlem, New York City. He served in various high-profile roles in the U.S. government, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Secretary of State. He became the first Black secretary of state.
He is associated with the “Powell Doctrine,” a set of principles that outlined when and how military force should be used. It emphasized clear political and military objectives, overwhelming force, and a clear exit strategy.
He served in the Vietnam War and later held several key positions, including National Security Advisor and Commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command.
Let’s read some of the best Colin Powell quotes about leadership, decision making, hard work and more.
Colin Powell Quotes
1. “Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.”
2. “I try to be the same person I was yesterday.”
3. “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.’”
4. “The country would be a lot better off if we stopped having comment sections. And if we got rid of Twitter.”
5. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life giving speeches.”
6. “When Jerry Springer thinks you’ve gone too far, my friends, you have gone too far.
People have asked me, ‘What would you have done if you hadn’t gone into the Army?’ I’d say I’d probably be a bus driver. I don’t know.”
7. “No matter how significant or life-changing your greatest hit or miss might be, neither even begins to define who you are. Each of us is a product of all our experiences and all our interactions with other people. To cite calculus, we are the area under the curve.”
8. “90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Leadership
1. “Leadership is solving problems.”
2. “Leaders need to know ground truth and not just what they get from reports and staffs.”
3. “Never neglect details. When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.”
4. “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.”
5. “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”
6. “There is no end to the good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
7. “Never neglect small details, even to the point of being a pest. Moments of stress, confusion, and fatigue are exactly when mistakes happen. And when everyone else’s mind is dulled or distracted, the leaders must be doubly vigilant. Always check ‘small things.’”
8. “You don’t step on enthusiasm.”
9. “But leaders are not gods. Their understanding is never totally clear, totally accurate, totally certain. Every leader is human… imperfectly human. Water-walkers sometimes fail, and quiet walkers sometimes end up on top. Leaders need to watch all their subordinate; work with all of them, encourage the hotshots, but invest in the others. Always be prepared to change your mind, however firmly made up, when dealing with those infinitely faceted beings we call people. The leader must never forget that he may end up working for one of them.”
10. “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’.”
11. “I think whether you’re having setbacks or not, the role of a leader is to always display a winning attitude.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Veterans
1. “It takes more courage to send men into battle than to fight the battle yourself.”
2. “The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”
3. “The nation owes a great debt to its veterans, whose. service to the nation spans every decade, every year, every day of our country’s existence.”
4. “Through untold courage and sacrifice, America’s veterans have secured the liberty which the founding fathers sought to establish here in the new world. Whenever and wherever the nation has called — in times of darkness and danger as well as in times of peace and prosperity — America’s veterans have been there. Veterans have proudly carried the torch of liberty for all to see.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Decisions
1. “Never believe the first thing you hear.”
2. “You can’t make good decisions unless you have good information and can separate facts from opinion and speculation.”
3. “Facts are verified information that is then presented as objective reality. The rub here is the verified part. How do you verify ‘verified’? Facts are slippery, and so is verification. Today’s verification may not be tomorrow’s. It turns out that facts may not really be facts; they can change as the verification changes; they may only tell part of the story, not the whole story; or they may be so qualified by verifiers that they’re empty of information.”
4. “Keep looking below surface appearances. Don’t shrink from doing so just because you might not like what you find.”
5. “• Tell me what you know. • Tell me what you don’t know. • Then tell me what you think. • Always distinguish which from which.”
6. “Control enthusiasm in the face of victories, large or small.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Timely Decisions
1. “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.”
2. “Naysayers are everywhere. They feel it’s the safest position to be in. It’s the easiest armor to wear… And they may be right in their negativity; reality may be on their side. But chances are very good that it’s not. You can only use their naysaying as one line in the spectrum of inputs to your decision. Listen to everyone you need to, and then go with your fearless instinct. Each of us must work to become a hardheaded realist, or else we risk wasting our time and energy pursuing impossible dreams. Yet constant naysayers pursue no less impossible dreams. Their fear and cynicism move nothing forward. They kill progress. How many cynics built empires, great cities, or powerful corporations?”
3. “Dig up all the information you can, then go with your instincts.”
4. “Never neglect details.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Hard Work
1. “Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves, those who work hard and play hard.”
2. “A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.
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.”
3. “A busy bastard can’t stop finding things to do. He never rests and as a result, his staff never rests. He’s always making work that expands to fill whatever time is available. The point I make in my book is: Be busy, work hard, but don’t become so busy that you cut out other things in life, like family and recreation and hobbies. And never be so busy that you’re not giving your staff and your followers enough time to do the same thing.”
4. “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.”
5. “The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting above average effort.”
6. “The freedom to do your best means nothing unless you are willing to do your best.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Decision Making
1. “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
2. “Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.”
3. “Don’t bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.”
4. “The day you are not solving problems or are not up to your butt 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.”
5. “Fear and failure are always present. Accept them as part of life and learn how to manage these realities. Be scared, but keep going. Being scared is usually transient. It will pass. If you fail, fix the causes and keep going.”
6. “Hope is not a strategy.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Failure
1. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
2. “It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.”
3. “Get mad, then get over it.”
4. “You should never be so involved with your position/job that when the position is gone your entire self image is gone with it.”
5. “never, never, never give up.”
6. “Don’t let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn’t go with it.”
7. “Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror.”
8. “If you get the dirty end of the stick, sharpen it and turn it into a useful tool.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Success
1. “Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.”
2. “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.”
3. “So like any football or basketball coach, you always always believe you’re going to win.”
4. “Any time you tolerate mediocrity in others, it increases your mediocrity, An important attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative acting people.”
5. “You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.”
6. “There are no secrets to success. Don’t waste time looking for them.”
7. “As successes come your way, remember that you didn’t do it alone. It is always we.”
Colin Powell Quotes on Teamwork
1. “Giving back involves a certain amount of giving up.”
2. “When things go badly, it is your fault, not theirs. You are responsible. Analyze how it happened, make the necessary fixes, and move on. No mass punishment or floggings. Fire people if you need to, train harder, insist on a higher level of performance, give halftime rants if that shakes a group up. But never forget that failure is your responsibility.”
3. “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.”
4. “The ties that bind us are stronger than the occasional stresses that separate us.”
5. “Humans are not by nature solitary. They need to connect with other human beings to share dreams and fears, to lean on each other, to enhance each other.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Excellence
1. “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.”
2. “Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard”
3. “You know what? You just suck it up and get started again. It’s a new day in which to excel.”
4. “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.”
5. “The most influential people in my life will never show up on a Google search.”
6. “If you take the pay, earn it. Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don’t disappoint yourself.”
7. “I get over it quickly and never lose control of myself.”
8. “If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters.”
Colin Powell Quotes on War
1. “You have to make sure you know why you are going to war and then use decisive force to end it as soon as possible.”
2. “Russia isn’t going to start a war. They can’t afford it. I think Mr. Putin can be dealt with if we stop screaming at him. You can work with the guy. You just have to know who he is.”
3. “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.”
4. “Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.”
5. “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.”
6. “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 About Children
1. “Standing in support of children is something we should all be able to get behind, regardless of party affiliation.”
2. “Children need to get a high-quality education, avoid violence and the criminal-justice system, and gain jobs. But they deserve more. We want them to learn not only reading and math but fairness, caring, self-respect, family commitment, and civic duty.”
3. “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.”
4. “We can seldom get our children to do what we tell them, but they almost never fail to imitate us.”
Colin Powell Quotes About Politics
1. “Politics is not bean bags. It’s serious, tough stuff.”
2. “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.”
3. “You need to understand, if you take out a government, take out a regime, guess who becomes the government and regime and is responsible for the country? You are. So if you break it, you own it.”
4. “You’re not just voting for an individual, in my judgment, you’re voting for an agenda. You’re voting for a platform. You’re voting for a political philosophy.”
5. “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”
6. “I consider myself a moderate Republican. I have very, very moderate social views, and I’m pretty strong on defense matters.”
7. “As the old expression goes, if you take the king’s coin, you give the king his due.”
8. “The idea that putting Americans ‘first’ requires a withdrawal from the world is simply wrongheaded because a retreat would achieve exactly the opposite for our citizens.”
Colin Powell Quotes About United States
1. “Look at the world. There is no pure competitor to the United States of America.”
2. “I don’t know that there is much the United States can do except work with the international community.”
3. “The United States is not stingy. We are the greatest contributor to international relief efforts in the world.”
4. “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.”
5. “Drones are just another weapon, and they turn out to be a very effective weapon that puts no American troops at risk, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use them against identified enemy targets.”
6. “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.”
7. “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.”
8. “It’s a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.”
These quotes by Colin Powell encapsulate his humility, honesty, and commitment to leadership which makes him a respected figure both in the United States and internationally.
He played a crucial role in the planning and execution of the Gulf War (1990–1991). He played a key role in shaping U.S. foreign policy during the early years of the Bush administration.
He was involved in presenting the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the United Nations, although he later expressed regret about the quality of the intelligence used. After leaving government service, Powell became an author and public speaker. His autobiography, “My American Journey,” was published in 1995.
Colin Powell was widely respected for his leadership, integrity, and dedication to public service. His career spanned several decades and encompassed both military and civilian roles, leaving a lasting impact on U.S. history and foreign policy.
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