"If you don't allow people to contribute,..." - Quote by Nelson Mandela
If you don't allow people to contribute, to offer their point of view, or to criticize what has been put before them, then they can never like you. And you can never build that instrument of collective leadership.
More by Nelson Mandela
“I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them.”
“Now we are in the second term of the government of a united nation and the government has done very well. One thing they have done, one thing people could not be blind to, was the achievement this government has made in giving human beings dignity, which they did not enjoy before. They now have dignity.”
“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”
More on Leadership
“One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform. Accepted authority rests first of all on reason.”
“[When asked how it felt to be a female prime minister:] I don't know: I've never experienced the alternative.”
“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.”
More on Collaboration
“Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity.”
“There are people here [in South Africa] who, whatever the debate is on a particular issue, their dominating idea is that at the end of the debate we must emerge stronger than we were before and closer to one another.”
“I began to make inquiries of the hundreds of successful men who collaborated with me in the organization of the science of success, and discovered that each of them had received guidance from unknown sources, although many of them were reluctant to admit this discovery.”