John W Gardner Famous Quotes
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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
"Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality."
Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
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.
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.
We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
John W Gardner Quotations
Committing yourself is a way of finding out who you are. A man finds his identity by identifying. A man's identity is not best thought of as the way in which he is separated from his fellows but the way in which he is united with them.
Robert Terwilliger
"I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts."
Abraham Lincoln
"When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it."
Margaret Chase Smith
If you look long enough into the void the void begins to look back through you.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
Aesop
For every person who wants to teach there are approximately thirty people who don't want to learn--much.
W C Sellar
"As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land but the fame that comes after is oblivion."
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
"A house without a cat, and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat, may be a perfect house, perhaps, but how can it prove its title --from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson"
Mark Twain
"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words."
Anna Sewell
How use doth breed a habit in a man.
William Shakespeare