Quotes by John W. Gardner

“Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.”

“One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.”

“Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the worlds ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.”

“Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of ones powers and talents.”

“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.”

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 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.

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

But a society in which pluralism is not undergirded by some shared values and held together by some measure of mutual trust simply cannot survive. Pluralism that reflects no commitments whatever to the common good is pluralism gone berserk... ..Leaders unwilling to seek mutually workable arrangements within systems to their own are not surviving the long-term interest of their constituents

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.

The world loves talent but pays off on character.

It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.

Art gropes it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods listening to itself and to everything around it unsure of itself waiting to pounce.

John Milton called his school Christ College a stony-hearted stepmother. The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.

One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy and it always feels uncomfortable.

To sensible men every day is a day of reckoning.

If one defines the term dropout to mean a person who has given up serious effort to meet his responsibilities then every business office government agency golf club and university faculty would yield its quota.

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.