John W. Gardner
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.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Education
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.Collection: Power
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Freedom
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.Collection: Great
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.Collection: Society
If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.Collection: Respect
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.Collection: Government
When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Education
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.Collection: Learning
History never looks like history when you are living through it.Collection: History
Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.Collection: Society
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.Collection: Politics
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
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.
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.
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.
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
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.
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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.
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.
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.
All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.
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.Collection: Courage
Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Greatness
A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.Collection: Leadership
Life is an endless process of self-discovery.Collection: Discovery
History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Thinking
All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.Collection: Celebration
We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.Collection: Community
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.Collection: Mean
The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."Collection: Business
The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.Collection: Leadership
The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.Collection: Creativity
The world loves talent but pays off on character.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Work
It is one of the ironies of history that reformers so often misjudge the consequences of their reforms.Collection: Reform
Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.Collection: Innovation
When hiring key employees, there are only two qualities to look for: judgement and taste. Almost everything else can be bought by the yard.Collection: Keys
The first and last task of aleader is to keep hope alive.Collection: Leadership
What leaders have to remember is that somewhere under the somnolent surface is the creature that builds civilizations, the dreamer of dreams, the risk taker. And remembering that, the leader must reach down to the springs that never dry up, the ever-fresh springs of the human spirit.Collection: Dream