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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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John W. Gardner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1912
Born: October 8
Died: 2002
Died: February 16
Author
Politician
LA
California
John William Gardner
John Gardner
Keep
Human
Disproved
Humans
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Nothing
Beautifully
Good
Societies
Men
Organized
Saws
Society
More quotes by John W. Gardner
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner
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.
John W. Gardner
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
The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.
John W. Gardner
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
All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.
John W. Gardner
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
All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
John W. Gardner
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
The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
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
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
John W. Gardner
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
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
John W. Gardner
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
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
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
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
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
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