Quote

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
Together
Attitude
Daily
Maintain
Cohesive
Need
Vision
Endure
Tension
Tensions
Giving
Belief
Integrity
Systems
Fiber
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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Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
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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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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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Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
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I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
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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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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
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The world loves talent but pays off on character.
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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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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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In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
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Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
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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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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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Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
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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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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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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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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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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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