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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.

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
Age
Sluggish
Hallmark
Aspirations
Aspiration
Tension
Institutions

More quotes by John W. Gardner

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To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
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We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.
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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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In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
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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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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.
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The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
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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.
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All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
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Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.
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The world loves talent but pays off on character.
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A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
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We need more than individual value systems we need a shared vision. A nation is held together by shared values, shared beliefs, shared attitudes. That is what enables a people to maintain a cohesive society despite the tensions of daily life. That is what enables them to rise above the conflicts that plague any society.
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Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
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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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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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One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
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True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
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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 of us celebrate our values in our behavior.
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