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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
Society
Keep
Human
Disproved
Humans
Readily
Nothing
Beautifully
Good
Societies
Men
Organized
Saws
More quotes by John W. Gardner
We need more than individual value systems we need a shared vision. A nation is held together by shared values, shared beliefs, shared attitudes. That is what enables a people to maintain a cohesive society despite the tensions of daily life. That is what enables them to rise above the conflicts that plague any society.
John W. Gardner
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
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
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 world loves talent but pays off on character.
John W. Gardner
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.
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
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
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
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
The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
John W. Gardner
To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
John W. Gardner
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
Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
John W. Gardner
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
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
We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.
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
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
John W. Gardner
