John W. Gardner Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

A nation is held together by shared values, shared beliefs, shared attitudes. That is what enables a people to maintain a cohesive society despite the tensions of daily life. This is what enables them to rise above the conflicts that plague any society. That is what gives a nation its tone, its fiber, its integrity, its moral style, its capacity to endure.

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
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
Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

John W. Gardner
If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure—all your life. It's as simple as that.

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

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

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

John W. Gardner
Some people seem to believe that for each problem there is a solution readily available - a solution that can be promptly achieved by passing a law and voting some money. I think of this as the vending machine concept of social change. Put a coin in the machine and out comes a piece of candy. If there is a social problem, pass a law and out comes a solution.

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

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

John W. Gardner
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.

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

John W. Gardner
For every talent that poverty has stimulated, it has blighted a hundred.

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 clear 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
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