Quote

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.

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
Payment
Price
Heavy
Failure
Pay
Fear

More quotes by John W. Gardner

Image
In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
John W. Gardner
Image
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
Image
We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.
John W. Gardner
Image
Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
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
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
Image
All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.
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
It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.
John W. Gardner
Image
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.
John W. Gardner
Image
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.
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
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.
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
All that we know about the interaction between leaders and constituents or followers tells us that communication and influence flow in both directions and in that two-way communication, nonrational, nonverbal, and unconscious elements play their part.
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
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner
Image
The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.
John W. Gardner