Top 100 Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation – that we’re all in this together, that we all have a voice – and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

52. “Aggression is inherently destructive of relationships. People and ideologies are pitted against each other, believing that in order to survive, they must destroy the opposition.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

53. “When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

54. “We each create our world by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinction that makes sense to us. We then ‘see’ the world through the self we have created.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

55. “Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

56. “We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

57. “When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

58. “Hopelessness has surprised me with patience.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

59. “No longer in a relational universe, can we study anything as separate from ourselves. Our acts of observation are part of the process that brings forth the manifestation of what we are observing.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

60. “I’ve wanted to see beyond the Western, mechanical view of the world and see what else might appear when the lens was changed.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

61. “We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

62. “I’m sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

63. “We experience problem-solving sessions as war zones, we view competing ideas as enemies, and we use problems as weapons to blame and defeat opposition forces. No wonder we can’t come up with real lasting solutions!”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

64. “I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

65. “Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

66. “Whatever your personal beliefs and experiences, I invite you to consider that we need a new worldview to navigate this chaotic time. We cannot hope to make sense using our old maps. It won’t help to dust them off or reprint them in bold colors. The more we rely on them, the more disoriented we become. They cause us to focus on the wrong things and blind us to what’s significant. Using them, we will journey only to greater chaos.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

67. “Space is the basic ingredient of the universe; there is more of it than anything else.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

68. “Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

69. “Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

70. “Surrendering to life offers some wonderful realizations. We learn we’re capable of being in this dance, of working with whatever happens. We learn to trust ourselves and then others and, gradually, we learn that life itself can be trusted.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

71. “Who you are depends on who you meet.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

72. “There are many benefits to this process of listening. The first is that good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process – we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

73. “I believe that the capacity that any organization needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

74. “These days, our senses are bombarded with aggression. We are constantly confronted with global images of unending, escalating war and violence.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

75. “For eons, humans have struggled to find less destructive ways of living together.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

76. “Life offers us this great gift of self-organization, how we can be held in the basin of shared meaning and, within that, exercise individual freedom. It is such a shame to waste it on fear and doubt. Or to seek to contain and control it.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

77. “We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

78. “Power is the capacity to generate relationships.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

79. “We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

80. “Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone’s commitment and intelligence.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

81. “In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

82. “Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

83. “Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

84. “Organizations are now confronted with two sources of change: the traditional type that is initiated and managed; and external changes over which no one has control.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

85. “All of us need better skills in listening, conversing, respecting one another’s uniqueness, because these are essential for strong relationships.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

86. “For us, someone who is willing to step forward and help is much more courageous than someone who is merely fulfilling the role.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

87. “Circles create soothing space...”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

88. “A world based on machine images is a world filled with boundaries. In a machine, every piece knows its place.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

89. “In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We’ve chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

90. “Life is creative. It makes it up as it goes along.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

91. “For example, I was discussing the use of email and how impersonal it can be, how people will now email someone across the room rather than go and talk to them. But I don’t think this is laziness, I think it is a conscious decision people are making to save time.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

92. “For me, this is a familiar image – people in the organization ready and willing to do good work, wanting to contribute their ideas, ready to take responsibility, and leaders holding them back, insisting that they wait for decisions or instructions.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

93. “We’ve taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations – soft-spoken, even whispered at first – that we need to encourage.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

94. “I think it is quite dangerous for an organisation to think they can predict where they are going to need leadership. It needs to be something that people are willing to assume if it feels relevant, given the context of any situation.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

95. “Most people associate command and control leadership with the military.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

96. “When error holds so much power, play disappears. Creativity ceases.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

97. “This is a world of process, not a world of things.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

98. “In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

99. “Sociologist James Evan reviewed citations in more than thirty-four million articles published in academic journals and noted how the number of different citations declined after the advent of search engines. These information-filtering tools, he observed, “serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t.”36.”

— Margaret J. Wheatley

100. “A culture focused on individual freedom can only result in narcissism, polarization, conflict, estrangement, and loneliness. What is the meaning of life when it’s all about me?”

— Margaret J. Wheatley