3 December 2020 John W. Gardner When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner 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.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner We are all faced with a series of great opportunities – brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner 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.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner 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.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
3 December 2020 John W. Gardner 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.
