Best Quotes by John W. Gardner (Top 10)
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Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John W. Gardner
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Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.
John W. Gardner
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True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
John W. Gardner
More John W. Gardner Quotes
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The cynic says, 'One man can't do anything.' I say, 'Only one man can do anything.'
John W. Gardner
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Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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History never looks like history when you are living through it.
John W. Gardner
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One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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. Gardner
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If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.
John W. Gardner
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When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
John W. Gardner
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Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.
John W. Gardner
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Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner
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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
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Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.
John W. Gardner
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Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.
John W. Gardner