John W Gardner - Best 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.

Freedom

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

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.

Failure

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

John W Gardner

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

Education

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

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.

Hot Quotes

Wushu is a move in Chinese a physical move. An attack. Wushu is like an art.

My first love is art and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

In my world history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought who won them and who lost them – unless there is a painting a play a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

Any work that aspires however humbly to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

When thou art at Rome do as they do at Rome.

Rock isn't art it's the way ordinary people talk.

Tell me thy company and I'll tell thee what thou art.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art like album-cover design without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.

Author: John W Gardner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.