Who was
John W. Gardner? An intelligent, wise and forward-thinking man, who served as
the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson.
I saw one of his quotes today posted on Twitter, and it struck me with its
wisdom. This was the quote—‘We are all faced with a series of great
opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems’. I thought about
how this somehow sums up much of what is going on in society at present—if opportunities
really become nothing more than impenetrable problems, then all the talk about
changing the world for the better will be nothing more than hot air because we
will be defeated by the rampant pessimism that is ever present in trying to bring
about change in the world. If a society can say that its problems are insoluble,
then the individuals living in that society don’t have to step up to the plate
and take responsibility for changing things for the better. Fear of failure /
fear of success? Interesting words from an interesting man.
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True
happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
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Some
people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
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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.
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The cynic says, "One man can't do
anything." I say, "Only one man can do anything."
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Excellence is doing ordinary things
extraordinarily well.
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Some people have greatness thrust upon them.
Very few have excellence thrust upon them.
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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.
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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.
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The hallmark of our age is the tension between
aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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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.
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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.
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One of the reasons people stop learning is that
they become less and less willing to risk failure.
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It is hard to feel individually responsible with
respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
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Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
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History never looks like history when you are
living through it.
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Our problem is not to find better values but to
be faithful to those we profess.
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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.
