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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
Respect
Helping
Become
Better
People
Respectability
Effective
Ethics
Army
More quotes by John W. Gardner
Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.
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In the United States, to an unprecedented degree, the individual's social role has come to be determined not by who he is but by what he can accomplish.
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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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If one defines the term 'dropout' to mean a person who has given up serious effort to meet his responsibilities, then every business office, government agency, golf club and university faculty would yield its quota.
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One exemplary act may affect one life, or even millions of lives. All those who set standards for themselves, who strengthen the bonds of community, who do their work creditably and accept individual responsibility, are building the common future.
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Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
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Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
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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
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
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A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
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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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An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.
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
