John W. Gardner quotes

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. (John W. Gardner)
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.
John W. Gardner
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn't consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won't buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clean air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.
John W. Gardner
We have to face the fact that most men and women out there are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit. (John W. Gardner)
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.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner
Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
John W. Gardner
We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner
If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.
John W. Gardner
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred. (John W. Gardner)
Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.
John W. Gardner
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.
John W. Gardner