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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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John W. Gardner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1912
Born: October 8
Died: 2002
Died: February 16
Author
Politician
LA
California
John William Gardner
John Gardner
Feel
Groups
Sector
Must
Fight
Movements
Nonprofit
Feels
Movement
Liberal
Maverick
Fighting
Impulse
Comfortably
Values
Critics
Innovators
Natural
Conservative
Impulses
Place
Democratic
Harbors
Home
Sun
Persuasion

More quotes by John W. Gardner

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Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
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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.
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A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
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The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
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The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
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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.
John W. Gardner
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In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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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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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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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
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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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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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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The world loves talent but pays off on character.
John W. Gardner
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All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
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