Top 60 John W. Gardner Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— John W. Gardner

2. “Life is an endless process of self-discovery.”

— John W. Gardner

3. “Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.”

— John W. Gardner

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

— John W. Gardner

5. “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.”

— John W. Gardner

6. “True happiness involves the full use of one’s power and talents.”

— John W. Gardner

7. “Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, “You can’t keep a good man down.” Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.”

— John W. Gardner

8. “A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.”

— John W. Gardner

9. “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

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

— John W. Gardner

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11. “All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.”

— John W. Gardner

12. “We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards.”

— John W. Gardner

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.”

— John W. Gardner

17. “Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.”

— John W. Gardner

18. “The cynic says, “One man can’t do anything”. I say, “Only one man can do anything.””

— John W. Gardner

19. “Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world’s ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.”

— John W. Gardner

20. “Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.”

— John W. Gardner

21. “We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.”

— John W. Gardner

22. “All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.”

— John W. Gardner

23. “The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.”

— John W. Gardner

24. “The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal.”

— John W. Gardner

25. “The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.”

— John W. Gardner

26. “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

27. “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

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

— John W. Gardner

29. “Creativity requires the freedom to consider ‘unthinkable’ alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices. Every organization, every society is under the spell of assumptions so familiar that they are never questioned, least of all by those most intimately involved.”

— John W. Gardner

30. “One man interacting creatively with others can move the world.”

— John W. Gardner

31. “The world loves talent but pays off on character.”

— John W. Gardner

32. “To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.”

— John W. Gardner

33. “When hiring key employees, there are only two qualities to look for: judgement and taste. Almost everything else can be bought by the yard.”

— John W. Gardner

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

— John W. Gardner

35. “Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.”

— John W. Gardner

36. “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

37. “The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself – and pays his psychoanalyst.”

— John W. Gardner

38. “The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.”

— John W. Gardner

39. “All that we know about the interaction between leaders and constituents or followers tells us that communication and influence flow in both directions; and in that two-way communication, nonrational, nonverbal, and unconscious elements play their part.”

— John W. Gardner

40. “All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.”

— John W. Gardner

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

— John W. Gardner

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Americans have always believed that-within the law-all kinds of people should be allowed to take the initiative in all kinds of activities. And out of that pluralism has come virtually all of our creativity. Freedom is real only to the extent that there are diverse alternatives.”

— John W. Gardner

45. “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

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

— John W. Gardner

47. “An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.”

— John W. Gardner

48. “What leaders have to remember is that somewhere under the somnolent surface is the creature that builds civilizations, the dreamer of dreams, the risk taker. And remembering that, the leader must reach down to the springs that never dry up, the ever-fresh springs of the human spirit.”

— John W. Gardner

49. “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

50. “History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.”

— John W. Gardner