Quotes from Howard Gardner

I make fun of Mensa. I don't know a great deal about Mensa - that's the high IQ group - but I say, 'To get into Mensa, you have to have a high IQ, and once you get in, you spend your time congratulating people who are in Mensa with you.' To me that's a pretty stupid way to spend your life.

I need to add that my work on multiple intelligences received a huge boost in 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his book on emotional intelligence. I am often confused with Dan. Initially, though Dan and I are longtime friends, this confusion irritated me.

If we want to have good workers and good citizens, we need to create common spaces in which individuals can talk about the moral and ethical dilemmas that they have faced and how they resolve them.

When we teach in pluralistic ways, there are two wonderful dividends. First of all, we reach more students, because some learn best through stories, some through works of art, some through role play etc. Second of all, we show what it is like really to understand something.

A continuing conversation with other persons, with cultural products, and with oneself, is a large part of what it means to be a human being, in our time and perhaps in all time.

Anything that is worth teaching can be presented in many different ways. These multiple ways can make use of our multiple intelligences.

If we were to abandon concern for what is true, what is false, and what remains indeterminate, the world would be totally chaotic. Even those who deny the importance of truth, on the one hand, are quick to jump on anyone who is caught lying.

I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.

While I've worked on many topics and written many books, I have not abandoned my interest in multiple intelligences.

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.

I am trained as a psychologist, and I think of all human issues in terms of psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary theory.

The accumulation and cross-generational transmission of wealth in the United States has gone way too far. When a young hedge-fund manager can take home a sum reminiscent of the gross national product of a small country, something is askew.

While truth is ultimately convergent, beauty is ultimately divergent. No one can and no one should tell anyone else what that person should consider beautiful.

Since we all have different cognitive profiles, educators should take those individual differences very seriously.

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.

The problems in our educational system are indissociable from broader malignant trends in our society, and they can't be solved by lots of testing and by punitive actions against schools that are not performing well.

We need to focus on the kind of human beings we want to have and the kind of society in which we want to live.

For most, the school is the first model of a community, and it can be a very powerful one. We need to ensure that young people are raised in educational communities that they admire and that they will seek to emulate or re-create for the rest of their lives.

The biggest communities in which young people now reside are online communities.

Hitler didn't travel. Stalin didn't travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn't want to have their orthodoxy challenged.

I am knowledgeable enough about the world of prizes to realize that there is a large degree of luck - both for the recognitions that you receive and those that you did not.

Creativity begins with an affinity for something. It's like falling in love.

As history unfolds, as cultures evolve, of course the intelligences which they value change.

Much of education can and should take place in schools and other formally designated community institutions. But the world beyond the schoolhouse is crucial to education, and both traditional and new media are more important than ever.