John W. Gardner Quotes

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.

Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.

If you don’t give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he’ll make plenty when he gets to college.

Perhaps the most promising trend in our thinking about leadership is the growing conviction that the purposes of the group are best served when the leader helps followers develop their own initiative, strengthens them in the use of their own judgment, enables them to grow, and to become better contributors.

At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.

It’s a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

True happiness involves the full use of one’s power and talents.

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world’s ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery – crocus on a garbage heap.

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

The cynic says, ‘One man can’t do anything.’ I say, ‘Only one man can do anything.’

One exemplary act may affect one life, or even millions of lives. All those who set standards for themselves, who strengthen the bonds of community, who do their work creditably and accept individual responsibility, are building the common future.

The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities – brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

Some people may have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them. They achieve it. They do not achieve it unwittingly, by “doin’ what comes naturally”; and they don’t stumble into it in the course of amusing themselves. All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

Leaders come in many forms, with many styles and diverse qualities. There are quiet leaders and leaders one can hear in the next county. Some find strength in eloquence, some in judgment, some in courage.