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Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.

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
Freedom
Practices
Alternatives
Requires
Consider
Creativity
Worth
Doubt
Cherished
Practice
Unthinkable

More quotes by 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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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.
John W. Gardner
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In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
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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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.
John W. Gardner
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Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner
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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
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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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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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
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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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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
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Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
John W. Gardner
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The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.
John W. Gardner
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Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner
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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.
John W. Gardner
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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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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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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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