Explore Quotes by John W. Gardner

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

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

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 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 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.

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

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.

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.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

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

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

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.

Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.

All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.

All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

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

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