Quote

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

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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
Often
Cutting
Schooled
Young
Teaching
Schooling
Today
Grow
Plants
Giving
Learning
Sunshine
Much
Technology
Flowers
People
Grows
Educational
Education
Plant
Monumentally
Teach
Flower
Ineffective

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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.
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True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
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The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
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The world loves talent but pays off on character.
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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.
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It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.
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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.
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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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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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All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
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We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.
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Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
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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.
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The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.
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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.
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It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
John W. Gardner
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The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
John W. Gardner
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When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
John W. Gardner