Famous Quotes

Quotes by John W Gardner

• 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.
• For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
• History never looks like history when you are living through it.
• 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.
• If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.
• It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
• 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.
• Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
• 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.
• One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
• Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
• The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
• 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.
• True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
• We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
• When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.