Leadership

[Constituents] do not in the long run respect leaders who mirror their own insecurities or see only the symptoms of crisis rather than the long term trends. The role of the leader is to assume the burden of acting on the basis of a confidence in his own assessment of the direction of events and how they can be influenced. Failing that, crises will multiply, which is another way of saying that a leader has lost control over events.
--Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 136 (1994)