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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.

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
Cohesive
Together
Attitude
Daily
Maintain
Tensions
Need
Vision
Endure
Tension
Fiber
Giving
Belief
Integrity
Systems
Life
Moral
Conflict
Beliefs
Conflicts
People
Nations
Capacity
Tone
Plague
Society
Value
Held
Enables
Values
Nation
Despite
Attitudes
Individual
Style
Rise
Shared

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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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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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Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
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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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True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
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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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In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
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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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One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
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All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
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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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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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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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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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Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
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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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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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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 creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
John W. Gardner