John W. Gardner Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Philosophy, Rain, Anger

  Dr. John W. Gardner (2015). “Excellence: Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too?”, p.97, Pickle Partners Publishing

  42 Copy quote

• Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

  John W. Gardner

  Inspirational, Success, Uplifting

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• Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

  John W. Gardner

  Life, Wisdom, Art

  "Cracking the Code of Our Physical Universe". Book by Matthew M. Radmanesh (p.269), May, 2006.

  85 Copy quote

• We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure-all your life.

  John W. Gardner

  Courage, Powerful, Fear

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• 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

  Education, Flower, Teaching

  55 Copy 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

  Ignorance, Simple, Two

  "A Nation Is Never Finished". ABA Journal, Volume 53, page 1011, November 1967.

  81 Copy quote

• Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.

  John W. Gardner

  Freedom, Creativity, Practice

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• Some people may have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them. They achieve it. They do not achieve it unwittingly, by “doin' what comes naturally”; and they don't stumble into it in the course of amusing themselves. All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

  John W. Gardner

  Greatness, Discipline, People

  "Excellence: Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too?".

  27 Copy quote

• True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.

  John W. Gardner

  Inspirational, Happiness, Using Your Talents

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• Life is an endless process of self-discovery.

  John W. Gardner

  Discovery, Self, Life Is

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• A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.

  John W. Gardner

  Leadership, Hope, Teaching

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• 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

  Life, Believe, Hard Work

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• History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

  John W. Gardner

  Inspirational, History, Looks

  "No Easy Victories". Book by John W. Gardner, December, 1968.

  26 Copy quote

• Perhaps the most promising trend in our thinking about leadership is the growing conviction that the purposes of the group are best served when the leader helps followers develop their own initiative, strengthens them in the use of their own judgment, enables them to grow, and to become better contributors.

  John W. Gardner

  Thinking, Leader, Groups

  JOHN W. GARDNER (1986). “LEADERSHIP PAPERS/3: THE HEART OF THE MATTER LEADER-CONSTITUENT INTERACTION”

  21 Copy quote

• All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.

  John W. Gardner

  Celebration, Behavior, Celebrate

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• Creativity requires the freedom to consider 'unthinkable' alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices. Every organization, every society is under the spell of assumptions so familiar that they are never questioned, least of all by those most intimately involved.

  John W. Gardner

  Art, Creativity, Practice

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, School, Cutting

  John W. Gardner (1971). “The Recovery of Confidence”

  32 Copy quote

• At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.

  John W. Gardner

  Children, Home, Apathy

  14 Copy quote

• One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good, nobody can touch Him.

  John W. Gardner

  Latin, Humorous, Reading

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• Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.

  John W. Gardner

  Relationship, People, Society

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• The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."

  John W. Gardner

  Business, Men, Cynic

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• One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.

  John W. Gardner

  Failure, Reading, Learning

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• 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

  Education, Teaching, School

  14 Copy quote

• America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.

  John W. Gardner

  Freedom, Commitment, Greatness

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• One exemplary act may affect one life, or even millions of lives. All those who set standards for themselves, who strengthen the bonds of community, who do their work creditably and accept individual responsibility, are building the common future.

  John W. Gardner

  Character, Responsibility, Community

  19 Copy quote

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