All John W. Gardner Quotes
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 in
Education
97% of people like this quote
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
John W. Gardner in
Government
62% of people like this quote
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John W. Gardner in
Experience
61% of people like this quote
When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
John W. Gardner in
Politics
58% of people like this quote
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
57% of people like this quote
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
56% of people like this quote
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
55% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner in
Politics
54% of people like this quote
Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.
John W. Gardner
54% of people like this quote
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner
53% of people like this quote
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 in
Society
53% of people like this quote
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner
53% of people like this quote
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
52% of people like this quote
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