Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality."

"I do not believe that children should have to pay for the shortcoming and inequities of the society into which they were born. I do not think that children should have to pay for the real or supposed sins of their parents. And I think it would be shortsighted of a society to produce, by its neglect, a group of future citizens very likely to be unproductive and characterized by bitterness ands alienation."

"Creativity requires the freedom to consider "unthinkable" alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices. Every organization, every society is under the spell of assumptions so familiar that they are never questioned, least of all by those most intimately involved."

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

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

"One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure."

"Once it was the skeptic, the critic of the status quo, who had to make a great effort. Today the skeptic is the status quo. The one who must make the effort is the man who seeks to create a new moral order."

"When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: “Only stand out of my light.” Perhaps some day we shall know ho to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light."

"[Leaders] can express the values that hold the society together. Most important, they can conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty preoccupations, carry them above the conflicts that tear a society apart, and unite them in the pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts."

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

"When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless."

"Freedom without moral commitments 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. "

"If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery."

"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."

"Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down."

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

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

"Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. "

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser._w_gardner.html#ixzz1aUmty9DZ"

"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."

"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."

"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. "

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

"I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive."

"True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents. "

"Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Few have excellence thrust upon them... achieve it. They do not achieve it unwittingly by doing what comes naturally and they don't stumble into it in the course of amusing themselves. All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose."

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

"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."

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

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

"Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality"