John W. Gardner Quotes

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

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.

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

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.

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.

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

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

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

The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.

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

Life is an endless process of self-discovery.

One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.

America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.

All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.

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

Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

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

It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.

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

All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

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

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

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.

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

The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.

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

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

Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.

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

The world loves talent but pays off on character.

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.

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

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.

If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.

The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal.

There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure-all your life.

When hiring key employees, there are only two qualities to look for: judgement and taste. Almost everything else can be bought by the yard.

We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards.

The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.

The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.

Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.

The first and last task of aleader is to keep hope alive.

The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the [nonprofit] sector is its relative freedom from constraints and its resulting pluralism.

One man interacting creatively with others can move the world.

In the United States, to an unprecedented degree, the individual's social role has come to be determined not by who he is but by what he can accomplish.