John W. Gardner

It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.

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

Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.

The cynic says, 'One man can't do anything.' I say, 'Only one man can do anything.'

The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

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.

Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

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

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

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

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