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
Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one’s powers and talents.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Talent, Power, Happiness, Wisdom
One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Failures, Risk-taking, Mistakes, Risk, Learning
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
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 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: Power, Life, Failure, Fear, Win, Courage
One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He’s good, nobody can touch Him.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: The Bible
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Aspirations
In the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
—John W. Gardner
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, Ethics
America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Education
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
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
If the modern leader doesn’t know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Leadership
The cynic says, “One man can’t do anything.” I say, “Only one man can do anything.”
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Potential
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
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: History
We should be painting a vastly greater mural on a vastly more spacious wall.
—John W. Gardner
I’ve watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I’ve concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career. Such self-assessments are no great problem at your age. You’re young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren’t what they used to be, then you’ll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you’ll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. And above all don’t imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Living, Experience, Growth
Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.
—John W. Gardner
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
We must strive to reach that simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Lies, Simplicity
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: Creativity
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Talent, Poverty
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
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
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: Creativity
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: Philosophy, Goodness, Kindness, Action, Society, Excellence, Virtue
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
To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Time Management
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
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Excellence
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