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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

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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
Dream
Reach
Remembering
Remember
Spring
Dreamer
Ever
Creatures
Dry
Human
Civilization
Creature
Humans
Dreams
Fresh
Taker
Must
Risk
Leaders
Civilizations
Never
Leader
Surface
Builds
Spirit
Somewhere
Springs

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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
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To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
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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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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 man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
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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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An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
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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.
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The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
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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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In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
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All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.
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