Quote

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

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
Persons
Office
Faculty
Person
Serious
Yield
Mean
Effort
Club
Work
Responsibility
Agency
Dropout
Every
Term
Clubs
Dropouts
Would
Business
University
Quota
Given
Golf
Defines
Government
Meet
Responsibilities

More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
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
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
John W. Gardner
Image
We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure-all your life.
John W. Gardner
Image
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
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
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
Image
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner
Image
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.
John W. Gardner
Image
To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
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
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