John W. Gardner Quotes

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.

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

All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery – crocus on a garbage heap.

Life is an endless process of self-discovery.

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.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.

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

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

The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

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.

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

Leaders develop their styles as they interact with their constituencies. They move toward the style that seems most effective in dealing with the mixture of elements that make up their constituencies.

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.

The cynic says, ‘One man can’t do anything.’ I say, ‘Only one man can do anything.’

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

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.

If you don’t give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he’ll make plenty when he gets to college.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

It’s a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.

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.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.

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.