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We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.

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
Payment
Price
Heavy
Failure
Pay
Fear

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It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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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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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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Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
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A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
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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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The world loves talent but pays off on character.
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The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
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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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To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
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Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
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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 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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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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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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All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
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An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
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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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