“Society is not like a machine that is created at some point in time and then maintained with a minimum of effort; a society is being continuously re-created, for good or ill, by its members. This will strike some as a burdensome responsibility, but it will summon others to greatness.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 127)
Quotes from Self Renewal
“Young people do not assimilate the values of their group by learning words (truth, justice, etc.) and their definitions. They learn attitudes, habits and ways of judging. They learn these in intensely personal transactions with their immediate family or associates. They learn them in the routines and crises of living, but they also learn them through songs, stories, drama, and games. They do not learn ethical principles; they emulate ethical (or unethical) people. They do not analyze or list the attributes they wish to develop; they identify with people who seem to them to have these attributes. That is why young people need models, both in their imaginative life and in their environment, models of what—at their best—they can be.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 124)
“Only birth can conquer death… Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous ‘recurrence of birth’ to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.”
Joseph Campbell, via Self-Renewal (Page 123)
“No society is likely to renew itself unless its dominant orientation is to the future. This is not to say that a society can ignore its past. A people without historians would be as crippled as an individual with amnesia. They would not know who they were. In helping a society to achieve self-knowledge, the historian serves the cause of renewal. But in the renewing society the historian consults the past in the service of the present and the future.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 105)
“A good many of the most valuable people in any society will never burn with zeal for anything except the integrity and health and well-being of their own families—and if they achieve those goals, we need ask little more of them. There are other valuable members of a society who will never generate conviction about anything beyond the productive output of their hands or minds—and a sensible society will be grateful for their contributions. Nor will it be too quick to define some callings as noble and some as ordinary. One may not quite accept Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum—’Every calling is great when greatly pursued’—but the grain of truth is there.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 104)
“There are those who think of the meaning of life as resembling the answer to a riddle. One searches for years, and then some bright day one finds it, like the prize at the end of a treasure hunt. It is a profoundly misleading notion. The meanings in any life are multiple and varied. Some are grasped very early, some late; some have a heavy emotional component, some are strictly intellectual; some merit the label religious, some are better described as social. But each kind of meaning implies a relationship between the person and some larger system of ideas or values, a relationship involving obligations as well as rewards. In the individual life, meaning, purpose and commitment are inseparable. When one succeeds in the search for identity one has found the answer not only to the question ‘Who am I?’ but to a lot of other questions too: ‘What must I live up to? What are my obligations? To what must I commit myself?'”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 103)
“We pretend that so many courses, so many credits, so many hours in a classroom, so many books read add up to an education. The same is true of research, on which we now spend billions of dollars annually. We seem immensely satisfied with the outer husk of the enterprise—the number of dollars spent, the size of laboratories, the number of people involved, the fine projects outlined, the number of publications. Why do we grasp so desperately at externals? Partly because we are more superficial than we would like to admit. Perhaps partly because we are too lazy or too preoccupied to go to the heart of the problem. But also because it is easier to organize the external aspects of things. The mercurial spirit of great teaching and great scholarship cannot be organized, rationalized, delegated or processed. The formalities and externals can.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 82)
“Every top executive and every analyst sitting at the center of a communications network should periodically emerge from his world of abstractions and take a long unflinching look at unprocessed reality. Every general should spend some time at the front lines; every research administrator should spend some time in the laboratory doing research of his own; every sales manager should take his sample case out periodically and call on customers; every politician should get out and ring doorbells.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 79)
“Nothing is more vital to the renewal of an organization (or society) than the system by which able people are nurtured and moved into positions where they can make their contribution. In an organization this implies effective recruitment and a concern for the growth of the individual that extends from the earliest training stages through the later phases of executive development. For a society it implies the correction of social and economic conditions that blight and smother talent in childhood; a deeply rooted tradition—going far beyond formal schooling—of the full development of individual potentialities; and the existence of social mobility such that talent from any segment of the population may move freely into significant roles in the society.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 76)
“The ever-renewing organization (or society) is not one which is convinced that it enjoys eternal youth. It knows that it is forever growing old and must do something about it. It knows that it is always producing deadwood and must, for that reason, attend to its seedbeds. The seedlings are new ideas, new ways of doing things, new approaches. If all innovations must pass before one central decision point, they have just one chance to survive and a slim one at that. In an organization with many points of initiative and decision, an innovation stands a better chance of survival; it may be rejected by nine out of ten decision makers and accepted by the tenth. if it then proves its worth, the nine may adopt it later.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 68)
“Specialization is biologically, socially and intellectually necessary. The highest reaches of education will always involve learning one thing in great depth. The great artist or scientist often achieves the heights of performance through intensive cultivation of a narrow sector of his potentialities.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 24)
“All too often we are giving our young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. We are stuffing their heads with the products of earlier innovation rather than teaching them to innovate. We think of the mind as a storehouse to be filled when we should be thinking of it as an instrument to be used.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 21)
“The relation of education to the level of motivation in the society is more direct than most people recognize. The goals the young person sets for himself are very heavily affected by the framework of expectations with which adults surround him. The educational system provides the young person with a sense of what society expects of him in the way of performance. If it is lax in its demands, then he will believe that such are the expectations of his society. If much is expected of him, the chances are that he will expect much of himself. This is why it is important that a society create an atmosphere that encourages effort, striving and vigorous performance.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 20)
“Everyone has noted the abundant resources of energy that seem available to those who enjoy what they are doing or find meaning in what they are doing. Self-renewing people know that if they have no great conviction about what they are doing they had better find something that they can have great conviction about. All of us cannot spend all of our time pursuing our deepest convictions. But all of us, either in our careers or as part-time activities, should be doing something about which we care deeply.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 16)
“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. It’s as simple as that.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 15)
“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. We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 13)
“Exploration of the full range of our own potentialities is not something that we can safely leave to the chances of life. It is something to be pursued systematically, or at least avidly, to the end of our days. We should look forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities and the claims of life—not only the claims we encounter but the claims we invent. And by potentialities I mean not just skills, but the full range of our capacities for sensing, wondering, learning, understanding, loving and aspiring.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 11)
“That is why travel is a vivid experience for most of us. 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, Self-Renewal (Page 9)
“As Peter Drucker has pointed out, in a world buffeted by change, faced daily with new threats to its safety, the only way to conserve is by innovating. The only stability possible is stability in motion.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 7)
“The renewal of societies and organizations can go forward only if someone cares. Apathy and lowered motivation are the most widely noted characteristics of a civilization in decline. Apathetic men and women accomplish nothing. Those who believe in nothing change nothing for the better. They renew nothing and heal no one, least of all themselves.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page xxi)