Quotes from John W. Gardner

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.

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

Paralysis of leadership is due in part to the unseen grip of the special interests.

True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.

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

If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.

It is one of the ironies of history that reformers so often misjudge the consequences of their reforms.

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.

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

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

A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.

The first and last task of aleader is to keep hope alive.

Life is an endless process of self-discovery.

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

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.

If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.

Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

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.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

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.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.

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.