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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.
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
People
Best
Aimless
Live
Diversion
Hard
Kept
Work
Secret
Something
Belief
Believe
Rather
Would
America
Life
Today
More quotes by John W. Gardner
To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
John W. Gardner
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
John W. Gardner
Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.
John W. Gardner
All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
John W. Gardner
If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.
John W. Gardner
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner
We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
