Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John W. Gardner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1912
Born: October 8
Died: 2002
Died: February 16
Author
Politician
LA
California
John William Gardner
John Gardner
Respect
Helping
Become
Better
People
Respectability
Effective
Ethics
Army

More quotes by John W. Gardner

Image
Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
John W. Gardner
Image
At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.
John W. Gardner
Image
To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
John W. Gardner
Image
Leaders develop their styles as they interact with their constituencies. They move toward the style that seems most effective in dealing with the mixture of elements that make up their constituencies.
John W. Gardner
Image
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
Image
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
John W. Gardner
Image
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
Image
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner
Image
In the United States, to an unprecedented degree, the individual's social role has come to be determined not by who he is but by what he can accomplish.
John W. Gardner
Image
The [nonprofit] sector is the natural home of nonmajoritarian impulses, movements and values. It comfortably harbors innovators, maverick movements, groups which feel they must fight for their place in the sun, and critics of both liberal conservative persuasion.
John W. Gardner
Image
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
Image
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
John W. Gardner
Image
When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
John W. Gardner
Image
The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.
John W. Gardner
Image
The play of conflicting interests in a framework of shared purposes is the drama of a free society. It is a robust exercise, and often a noisy one. It is not for the faint-hearted, or the tidy-minded.
John W. Gardner
Image
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
Image
A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
John W. Gardner
Image
In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
John W. Gardner
Image
The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
John W. Gardner
Image
The world loves talent but pays off on character.
John W. Gardner