Explore Quotes by John W. Gardner

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

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.

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

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

Paralysis of leadership is due in part to the unseen grip of the special interests.

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.

The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.

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.

The [nonprofit] sector is the natural home of nonmajoritarian impulses, movements and values. It comfortably harbors innovators, maverick movements, groups which feel they must fight for their place in the sun, and critics of both liberal conservative persuasion.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the [nonprofit] sector is its relative freedom from constraints and its resulting pluralism.

I think that all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stuff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they always have been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on.

Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.

Life is an endless process of self-discovery.

The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal.

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.

The first and last task of aleader is to keep hope alive.

One man interacting creatively with others can move the world.

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

If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.

But if we believe what we profess concerning the worth of the individual, then the idea of individual development within a framework of ethical purpose must become our deepest concern, our national preoccupation, our passion, our obsession. We must think of education as relevant for everyone everywhere - at all ages and in all conditions of life.