"The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say 'I.' And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say 'I.' They don't think 'I.' They think 'we'; they think 'team.' They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but 'we' gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done."

"When President Barack Obama is trying to persuade Americans not to do something, he has a go-to line: 'That's not who we are.' Whether the issue involves discrimination, immigration, torture, criminal violence or health care, he invokes the nation's very identity."

"A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism and spends his energies upon that."

"I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious."

"This House cannot function without an open, accountable, and independent ethics process; and the molestation of that process by the majority is an abuse of power that cannot stand."