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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
Feels
Movement
Liberal
Maverick
Fighting
Impulse
Comfortably
Values
Critics
Innovators
Natural
Conservative
Impulses
Place
Democratic
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Home
Sun
Persuasion
Feel
Groups
Sector
Must
Fight
Movements
Nonprofit

More quotes by John W. Gardner

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True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
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Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
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Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
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Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
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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.
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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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A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
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.
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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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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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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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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.
John W. Gardner
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To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
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One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner
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An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
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The ablest and most effective leaders do not hold to a single style they may be highly supportive in personal relations when that is needed, yet capable of a quick, authoritative decision when the situation requires it.
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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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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
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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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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