John W. Gardner Quotes

I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past.

The urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.

We cannot go backward,' Marco says. 'A great deal is not how it used to be.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

I don't have any personal challenges about throwing away the past. If you're not changing, you're giving others a chance to catch up.

Change or stagnate. Keep moving or die.

The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.

So often I heard people paying blind obeisance to change - as though it had some virtue of its own. Change or we will die. Change or we will stagnate. Evergreens don't stagnate.

The last thing we want is to remain as we are.

If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.

My new motto is: When you're through changing, you're through.

When you're finished changing, you're finished.

When you are through changing, you are through.

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

I don't know really, it doesn't feel like it has changed to me but I think to have to move with the times. Try out different areas and not get stuck in 1978.

It's evolve or die, really, you have to evolve, you have to move on otherwise it just becomes stagnant.

Those who get stuck doing the same things for too long are bound to get left behind the strong who press on and re-invent themselves.

We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

You always have to evolve - the minute you start building a moat around you to keep yourself safe, you're going to lose.

If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

Conservation destroys the present. If we are only busy preserving the past, we are not living in the present and unable to look forward. I am against conservation. We should let young people move forward, whether we agree with them or not. We should let new things happen.

The price of doing the same old thing is higher than the price of change.

Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.