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
88% 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
65% of people like this quote
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John W. Gardner in
Experience
60% of people like this quote
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
59% 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
56% 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
55% 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
55% of people like this quote
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
55% 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
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
55% 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
54% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.
John W. Gardner
53% of people like this quote
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
John W. Gardner in
History
53% of people like this quote
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner in
Politics
53% of people like this quote
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