Top 60 Jack Weatherford Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The first key to leadership is self-control.”

— Jack Weatherford

2. “Without the vision of a goal, a man cannot manage his own life, much less the lives of others.”

— Jack Weatherford

3. “If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead. Even the highest mountain had animals that step on it.”

— Jack Weatherford

4. “Genghis Khan warned them against the pursuit of a “colorful” life with material frivolities and wasteful pleasures. “It will be easy,” he explained, “to forget your vision and purpose once you have fine clothes, fast horses, and beautiful women.” In that case, “you will be no better than a slave, and you will surely lose everything.”

— Jack Weatherford

5. “A leader should demonstrate his thoughts and opinions through his actions, not through his words.”

— Jack Weatherford

6. “Even in this high-tech age, the low-tech plant continues to be the key to nutrition and health.”

— Jack Weatherford

7. “Victory did not come to the one who played by the rules; it came to the one who made the rules and imposed them on his enemy.”

— Jack Weatherford

8. “Geoffrey Chaucer, the first author in the English language, devoted the longest story in The Canterbury Tales to the Asian conqueror Genghis Khan of the Mongols.”

— Jack Weatherford

9. “You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people.”

— Jack Weatherford

10. “Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrive in the face of all contrary evidence.”

— Jack Weatherford

11. “The Mongols did not find honor in fighting; they found honor in winning.”

— Jack Weatherford

12. “Bukhara. Before the year ended, the Mongols had.”

— Jack Weatherford

13. “Genghis Khan recognized that warfare was not a sporting contest or a mere match between rivals; it was a total commitment of one people against another. Victory did not come to the one who played by the rules; it came to the one who made the rules and imposed them on his enemy.”

— Jack Weatherford

14. “In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people.”

— Jack Weatherford

15. “Genghis Khan had well-founded and unshakable faith in his daughters and the other women around him. “Whoever can keep a house in order,” he said, “can keep a territory in order.” As the military campaigns grew longer, the division of labor solidified into a division of command authority. At its heart, the dual-shaft system functioned quite simply. She ruled at home; he served abroad. Even.”

— Jack Weatherford

16. “While words may be altered or censored, the truth endures, even when not properly recorded. Truth can be forgotten, misplaced, or lost, but never annihilated.”

— Jack Weatherford

17. “The great struggle of history has been for the control over money. It is almost tautological to affirm that to control the production and distribution of money is to control the wealth, resources, and people of the world.”

— Jack Weatherford

18. “Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism.”

— Jack Weatherford

19. “Unlike societies that employed baroque procedures for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate children, the Mongols accepted all children as equal. No child could be born without the consent of the Eternal Blue Sky. No earthly law or custom could presume to declare the child illegitimate.”

— Jack Weatherford

20. “He admonished them never to think of themselves as the strongest or smartest. Even the highest mountain had animals that step on it, he warned. When the animals climb to the top of the mountain, they are even higher than it is.”

— Jack Weatherford

21. “Most empires of conquest in history have imposed their own civilisation on the conquered... By comparison the Mongols trod lightly on the world they conquered.”

— Jack Weatherford

22. “The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turks from the East had failed to do in two centuries of sustained effort. They had conquered the heart of the Arab world. No other non-Muslim troops would conquer Baghdad or Iraq again until the arrival of the American and British forces in 2003.”

— Jack Weatherford

23. “The truth may be hard to find, but it is out there – somewhere.”

— Jack Weatherford

24. “Smell holds a deep, important place within steppe culture. Where people in other cultures might hug or kiss at meeting or departing, the steppe nomads sniff one another in a gesture much like a kiss on the cheek.”

— Jack Weatherford

25. “The Mongols, and certainly Genghis Khan in particular, placed great importance on sudden individual acts of unexpected heroism. Those are the moments that reveal not just the character of the person, but the soul itself. Many people are paralyzed by fear or, equally as debilitating, by indecision. The hero acts, and often fails, but acts nonetheless.”

— Jack Weatherford

26. “They quickly discerned the advantages of utilizing columns of numbers or place numbers in the style of Arabic numerals, and they introduced the use of zero, negative numbers, and algebra in China.”

— Jack Weatherford

27. “This information in turn greatly influenced our understanding of Genghis Khan’s field methods and how he treated hostile civilians as animals to be herded but hostile soldiers as game to be hunted.”

— Jack Weatherford

28. “Outlawing the sale or barter of women marked Genghis Khan’s first important departure from tribal practices regarding marriage, and gradually through a series of such changes he transformed the social position of his daughters, and thereby of all women, within his burgeoning empire.”

— Jack Weatherford

29. “Three of her sisters became queens along the Silk Route, ruling over the grand Turkic nations of Onggud, Uighur, and Karluk.”

— Jack Weatherford

30. “In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan, together with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history.”

— Jack Weatherford

31. “Because you are the daughter of your Khan father, you are sent to govern the people of the Oirat tribe.”

— Jack Weatherford

32. “No friend is better than your own wise heart!” Genghis Khan.”

— Jack Weatherford

33. “Terror, he realized, was best spread not by the acts of warriors, but by the pens of scribes and scholars.”

— Jack Weatherford

34. “She lived in an environment that few people in the world have ever been able to survive. What knowledge did she have that made that possible? How did she survive for so long in a place that would kill most of us within days? Soon after my visit the old woman died, and now we may never know.”

— Jack Weatherford

35. “Although the army of Genghis Khan killed at an unprecedented rate and used death almost as a matter of policy and certainly as a calculated means of creating terror, they deviated from standard practices of the time in an important and surprising way. The Mongols did not torture, mutilate, or maim.”

— Jack Weatherford

36. “The royal Mongol women raced horses, commanded in war, presided as judges over criminal cases, ruled vast territories, and sometimes wrestled men in public sporting competitions. They arrogantly rejected the customs of civilized women of neighboring cultures, such as wearing the veil, binding their feet, or hiding in seclusion.”

— Jack Weatherford

37. “Only a few details have survived from Temujin’s earliest childhood, and they do not suggest that he was highly valued by his father. His father once accidentally left him behind when they moved to another camp.”

— Jack Weatherford

38. “Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had. In their lifetime they could not be ignored, but when they left the scene, history closed the door behind them and let the dust of centuries cover their tracks. Those Mongol queens were too unusual, too difficult to understand or explain. It seemed more convenient just to erase them. Around.”

— Jack Weatherford

39. “The myth of the pioneer family or lone frontiersman venturing into virgin forest to hack out a meager homestead is belied by the thoroughly organized commercial value of such ventures. The main figure in the settlement of the west was the land company, which frequently operated not only on the edge of civilization but on the edge of legality as well.”

— Jack Weatherford

40. “Maintain your soul as one in the night and the day.”

— Jack Weatherford

41. “Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had.”

— Jack Weatherford

42. “From riding nearly fifty miles in one day on a horse, I learned that the fifteen feet of silk tied tightly around the midriff actually kept the organs in place and prevented nausea.”

— Jack Weatherford

43. “War for the nomadic people was a sort of production.”

— Jack Weatherford

44. “Printing with movable letters probably began in China in the middle of the twelfth century, but.”

— Jack Weatherford

45. “The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense.”

— Jack Weatherford

46. “Get up early and go to bed late.”

— Jack Weatherford

47. “Despite the initial reliance of commerce on routes created through military conquest, it soon became obvious that whereas armies moved quickest by horse across land, massive quantities of goods moved best by water. Mongols expanded and lengthened the Grand Canal that already connected the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to transport grain and other agricultural products farther and more efficiently into the northern districts.”

— Jack Weatherford

48. “Although many people can be your helper, no one should be closer to you than your own consciousness.”

— Jack Weatherford

49. “He had far more goods now than he could possibly use or distribute to his people, and he wanted to use this vast amount of new resources to stimulate trade.”

— Jack Weatherford

50. “Religious clerics, political ideologues, and government bureaucrats do not have the right to change history. The truth may be hard to find, but it is out there – somewhere. If we do not continue the work, the truth remains hidden. If we stop the search, then the censor has defeated us.”

— Jack Weatherford