John W. Gardner

“The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.”

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

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“History never looks like history when you are living through it.”

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

“If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.”

“Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.”