“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
“The first quality of a leader of people – always the first quality – is a devotion to truth.”
Leon MacLaren, Principles of Music, 1978
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "The first quality of a leader of people – always the first quality – is a devotion to truth." by Leon MacLaren?
Leon MacLaren10
British philosopher 1910–1994Related quotes
“Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.”
Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet
Ibid., p. 241
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Saber iludir-se bem é a primeira qualidade do estadista.
“There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.”
John Updike book Rabbit, Run
Source: Rabbit, Run
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In Great Contemporaries, "Alfonso XIII" (1937).
The 1930s
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist
Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.44
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)
Context: The quality of feeling is the true psychical representative of the first category of the immediate as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness. Qualities of feeling show myriad-fold variety, far beyond what the psychologists admit. This variety however is in them only insofar as they are compared and gathered into collections. But as they are in their presentness, each is sole and unique; and all the others are absolute nothingness to it — or rather much less than nothingness, for not even a recognition as absent things or as fictions is accorded to them. The first category, then, is Quality of Feeling, or whatever is such as it is positively and regardless of aught else.
Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power
Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 65.
Alfred North Whitehead book Religion in the Making
Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma".
1920s
Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.