John W. Gardner

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.

But a society in which pluralism is not undergirded by some shared values and held together by some measure of mutual trust simply cannot survive. Pluralism that reflects no commitments whatever to the common good is pluralism gone berserk... ..Leaders unwilling to seek mutually workable arrangements within systems to their own are not surviving the long-term interest of their constituents

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you don't give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he'll make plenty when he gets to college.

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

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.

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

True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.

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

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

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

If one defines the term 'dropout' to mean a person who has given up serious effort to meet his responsibilities then every business office government agency golf club and university faculty would yield its quota.

To sensible men every day is a day of reckoning.