John W. Gardner Quotes

John William Gardner, was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson. He was also President of the Carnegie Corporation and the founder of two influential national U.S. organizations: Common Cause and Independent Sector.
(1912 - 2002)

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

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. [America]

Art gropes, it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

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

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

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.

If one defines the term 'dropout' to mean a person who has given up serious effort to meet his responsibilities, then every business office, government agency, golf club and university faculty would yield its quota. [Work]

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.

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

John Milton called his school, Christ College, 'a stony-hearted stepmother'. The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education. [Education]

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.

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. [Life]

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.

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. [Education]

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

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

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.

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

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