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

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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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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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We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.
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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.
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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
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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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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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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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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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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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Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
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A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
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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 ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.
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To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
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In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
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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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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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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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