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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.
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
Come
Determined
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Role
Roles
United
Individual
Unprecedented
Social
Degree
States
Accomplish
More quotes by John W. Gardner
True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
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 hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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 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
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
The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
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 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
The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
John W. Gardner
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
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
All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
John W. Gardner
It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.
John W. Gardner
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
All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.
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
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner
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
