John W Gardner Quotes

Life is like a drawing without an eraser

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

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.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is 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 world loves talent but pays off on character.

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.

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

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

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser

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.

Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, “You can’t keep a good man down.” Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.

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

We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within… By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

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.

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 observed, “If I had to name a single all-purpose instrument of leadership, it would be communication.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied "Only stand out of my light". Perhaps someday we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.

A generation doesn't have much choice in the problems that the forces of history throw in its lap. It does have a choice as to whether it will face those problems honestly. We need continuous and candid debate as to what the most important problems are, and whether we're turning our backs on them or solving them or making them worse.

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

Bibb Steam Mill Company also introduced to the county the ruthless form of industrial slavery that would become so important as the Civil War loomed. The mill acquired twenty-seven male African Americans, nearly all strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six small barracks on its property. The Cottingham slave cabins would have seemed luxurious in contrast.51 The founders of Bibb Steam, entrepreneurs named William S. Philips, John W. Lopsky, Archibald P. McCurdy, and Virgil H. Gardner, invested a total of $24,000 to purchase 1,160 acres of timbered land and erect a steam-powered sawmill to cut lumber and grind corn and flour.52 In addition to the two dozen slaves, Bibb Steam most likely leased a larger number of slaves from nearby farms during its busiest periods of work. The significance of those evolutions wouldn’t have been lost on a slave such as Scipio. By the end of the 1850s, a vigorous practice of slave leasing was already a fixture of southern life. Farm production was by its nature an inefficient cycle of labor, with intense periods of work in the early spring planting season and then idleness during the months of “laid-by” time in the summer, and then another great burst of harvest activity in the fall and early winter, followed finally by more months of frigid inactivity. Slave owners were keen to maximize the return on their most valuable assets, and as new opportunities for renting out the labor of their slaves arose, the most clever of slave masters quickly responded.

Individuals so educated will keep the society itself flexible, adaptive and innovative.

We are stuffing their heads with the products of earlier innovation rather than teaching them to innovate.

There is no learning without some difficulty

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

The good society is not one that ignores individual differences but one that deals with them wisely and humanely.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. —JOHN W. GARDNER