John W. Gardner Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all John W. Gardner Quotes
Someone said that Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

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

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

John W. Gardner
In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.

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

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

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

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

John W. Gardner
Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.

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

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
Many of the major changes in history have come about through successive small innovations, most of them anonymous.

John W. Gardner
Those whose gifts fit them for leadership must recognize that a prime function of the leader is to keep hope alive.

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
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
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
Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor.

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

John W. Gardner
We may learn something about the renewal of societies if we look at the kind of men who contribute most to that outcome — the innovators.

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
Whoever I am or whatever I am doing, provided that I am engaged in a socially acceptable activity, some kind of excellence is within my reach.

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
Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.

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
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.

John W. Gardner