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To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.

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
Men
Reckoning
Karma
Sensible
Every

More quotes by John W. Gardner

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It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
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The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
John W. Gardner
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Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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
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An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner