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Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner
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John W. Gardner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1912
Born: October 8
Died: 2002
Died: February 16
Author
Politician
LA
California
John William Gardner
John Gardner
Perfection
Ordinary
Success
Administrative
Inspirational
Extraordinarily
Wells
Softball
Well
Uplifting
Believe
Excellence
Things
Meaningful
More quotes by John W. Gardner
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
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
We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.
John W. Gardner
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
John W. Gardner
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner
The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.
John W. Gardner
All that we know about the interaction between leaders and constituents or followers tells us that communication and influence flow in both directions and in that two-way communication, nonrational, nonverbal, and unconscious elements play their part.
John W. Gardner
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
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.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
John W. Gardner
We have to face the fact that most men and women out there are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit.
John W. Gardner
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
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
The ablest and most effective leaders do not hold to a single style they may be highly supportive in personal relations when that is needed, yet capable of a quick, authoritative decision when the situation requires it.
John W. Gardner
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.
John W. Gardner
The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.
John W. Gardner
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
