Quote

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.

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
Reckoning
Karma
Sensible
Every
Men

More quotes by John W. Gardner

Image
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
Image
The ablest and most effective leaders do not hold to a single style they may be highly supportive in personal relations when that is needed, yet capable of a quick, authoritative decision when the situation requires it.
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
The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
John W. Gardner
Image
What leaders have to remember is that somewhere under the somnolent surface is the creature that builds civilizations, the dreamer of dreams, the risk taker. And remembering that, the leader must reach down to the springs that never dry up, the ever-fresh springs of the human spirit.
John W. Gardner
Image
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
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
A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
John W. Gardner
Image
Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.
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 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
Image
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner
Image
If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.
John W. Gardner
Image
We need more than individual value systems we need a shared vision. A nation is held together by shared values, shared beliefs, shared attitudes. That is what enables a people to maintain a cohesive society despite the tensions of daily life. That is what enables them to rise above the conflicts that plague any society.
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
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
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
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
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
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