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
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
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, Courage, Win, Fear, Failure, Life
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: To Be Born Everyday, Creativity, Questioning
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
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: Society, Action, Philosophy, Goodness, Excellence, Virtue, Kindness
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Excellence
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: Leadership, Quality
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
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, Light, To Be Born Everyday
We should be painting a vastly greater mural on a vastly more spacious wall.
—John W. Gardner
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
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: History
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
We must strive to reach that simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Lies, Simplicity
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Aspirations
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
One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Risk-taking, Risk, Failures, Learning, Mistakes
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
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
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 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
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Excellence
In the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: The Artist
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: The Poor, Poverty, Talent
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, Respect, Respectability
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.
—John W. Gardner
Topics: Opportunity, Problems
Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.
—John W. Gardner
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
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, Growth, Experience
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Stewart Udall American Politician
Colin Powell American Military Leader
Elliot Richardson American Lawyer
Robert F. Kennedy American Politician
J. William Fulbright American Political leader
George P. Shultz American Economist
Lyndon B. Johnson American Head of State
Hyman G. Rickover American Admiral
William Bennett American Politician
R. James Woolsey, Jr. American Diplomat