Paralysis of leadership is due in part to the unseen grip of the special interests.
John W. GardnerRead
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The events we experience in real-time often feel mundane and chaotic, not like the notable history we study later.
This quote by John W. Gardner highlights the idea that when we are immersed in significant events, they often do not seem remarkable or extraordinary. It suggests that the perception of history changes over time; the context of living through events can obscure their future significance and impact, making them feel like just another moment rather than something that will be remembered or scrutinized later on.
Themes
HistoryPerceptionLivingEventsSignificance
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a lecture on historical perspective to emphasize how we view current events with different significance later.
More from John W. Gardner
All quotes →More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.
John W. GardnerRead
Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.
John W. GardnerRead
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.
John W. GardnerRead
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.
John W. GardnerRead
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.
John W. GardnerRead
Similar quotes
In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.
Jared DiamondRead
Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.
W. E. B. Du BoisRead
The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.
Tom BrokawRead
In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He's a Russian emperor.
Simon Sebag-MontefioreRead
It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We're reaching a time that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.
Maya LinRead
It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.
Sally MannRead