Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by John W. Gardner (American Activist)

John William Gardner (1912–2002) was an American social and political activist. He was the president of the Carnegie Corporation and the secretary of health, education, and welfare under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Born in Los Angeles, Gardner studied psychology at Stanford University and earned a PhD from California-Berkeley. He then taught psychology at Connecticut College and Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, before serving in the Marines during World War II.

Gardner joined the Carnegie Corporation of New York staff in 1946, and, in 1955, he became president of that organization. In that role, he exerted enormous sway over American educational policy by supervising the country’s top educators’ strategy. In 1965, President Johnson named Gardner secretary of health, education, and welfare, a position he held until 1968. He organized the White House Fellows Program and introduced the Medicare and Medicaid federal health insurance programs.

Gardner created Common Cause in 1970 to promote government reform and enhance citizens’ participation in government. In 1970, he started the Experience Corps to engage adults age 50 and older as literacy instructors for struggling students in public schools.

Gardner’s works include Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961,) Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society (1964,) In Common Cause (1972,) On Leadership (1990,) and Living, Leading, and the American Dream (2003.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John W. Gardner

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery – crocus on a garbage heap.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Wealth

The cynic says, “One man can’t do anything.” I say, “Only one man can do anything.”
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Potential

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.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Education

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 some day 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.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: To Be Born Everyday, Creativity, Light

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.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Education

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Government

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Excellence

Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.
—John W. Gardner

A community has the power to motivate its members to exceptional performance. It can set standards of expectation for the individual and provide the climate in which great things can happen. It can pull extraordinary performance out of its members.
—John W. Gardner

Although leadership and the exercise of power are distinguishable activities, they overlap and interweave in important ways. Consider a corporate chief executive officer who has the gift for inspiring and motivating people, who has vision, who lifts the spirits of employees with a resulting rise in productivity and quality of product, and a drop in turnover and absenteeism. That is leadership. But evidence emerges that the company is falling behind in the technology race. One day with the stroke of a pen the CEO increases the funds available to the research division. That is the exercise of power. The stroke of a pen could have been made by an executive with none of the qualities one associates with leadership.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Leadership

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.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Excellence

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.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Failure, Life, Win, Power, Fear, Courage

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Goodness, Virtue, Philosophy, Excellence, Society, Action, Kindness

The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Aspirations

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Value of a Day, Time Management

Josh Billings said, “It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too.” Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Being True to Yourself

The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Government

You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.
—John W. Gardner

We must strive to reach that simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Lies, Simplicity

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Poverty, Talent, The Poor

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Honor, Community, Ethics

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.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Education

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.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Quality, Leadership

Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Confidence, Drugs, Self-Pity

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Opportunity, Problems

In the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: The Artist

In the United States, to an unprecedented degree, the individual’s social role has come to be determined not by who he is but by what he can accomplish.
—John W. Gardner

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Helping, Respectability, Respect

History never looks like history when you are living through it.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: History

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.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Questioning, To Be Born Everyday, Creativity

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