He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader.

We searched Aristotle's extant corpus — the *Politics*, the *Nicomachean Ethics*, the *Eudemian Ethics*, and the *Rhetoric* — and found no passage matching this exact wording in any standard critical edition or major translation. There is a genuinely related idea in the *Politics*, Book III (around 1277a–1277b), where Aristotle argues that the good citizen must know both how to rule and how to be ruled, and that one who would command well must first learn to obey; but that "obey/command" language is a different thought from the modern "follower/leader" phrasing, which reads as a later popularized restatement rather than a documented translation. Our review of published books shows the line circulating widely in leadership and self-help literature — for instance in *A Treasury of Wisdom* by Rohit Pal (2016) and *Learning Communication & Teamwork: Leadership Gr. 3-8+* (2017), the latter crediting it to Aristotle — but these are modern compilations that reproduce the attribution without any textual anchor in Aristotle's works. We found no earlier named author, no competing primary source, and no documented instance showing the line originated with someone else, so there are no grounds to call it misattributed under our policy. What we have is a memorable aphorism consistent with a real Aristotelian theme, attached to his name in modern collections but never traced to anything he actually wrote. On the strength of that record, this quote is attributed.