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If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.
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
Helping
Become
Better
People
Respectability
Effective
Ethics
Army
Respect
More quotes by John W. Gardner
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.
John W. Gardner
The [nonprofit] sector is the natural home of nonmajoritarian impulses, movements and values. It comfortably harbors innovators, maverick movements, groups which feel they must fight for their place in the sun, and critics of both liberal conservative persuasion.
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What leaders have to remember is that somewhere under the somnolent surface is the creature that builds civilizations, the dreamer of dreams, the risk taker. And remembering that, the leader must reach down to the springs that never dry up, the ever-fresh springs of the human spirit.
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
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
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
Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, You can't keep a good man down. Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.
John W. Gardner
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
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
Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
John W. Gardner
The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
John W. Gardner
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
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
In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
John W. Gardner
All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
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
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
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner
