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John W. Gardner Quotes
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History never looks like history when you are living through it.
John W. Gardner
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Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
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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We are all faced with a series of great opportunities—brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
John W. Gardner
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Some people seem to believe that for each problem there is a solution readily available - a solution that can be promptly achieved by passing a law and voting some money. I think of this as the vending machine concept of social change. Put a coin in the machine and out comes a piece of candy. If there is a social problem, pass a law and out comes a solution.
John W. Gardner
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More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.
John W. Gardner
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Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.
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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Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
John W. Gardner
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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
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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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It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
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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Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn't consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won't buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clear air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery.
John W. Gardner
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The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
John W. Gardner
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Quote of the day
Good authors, too, who once knew better words Now only use four-letter words Writing prose — Anything goes.
Cole Porter
John W. Gardner
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Born:
October 8, 1912
Died:
February 16, 2002
(aged 89)
Bio:
John William Gardner was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson.
Known for:
On Leadership
The recovery of confidence
Living, Leading, and the American Dream
Most used words:
people
life
society
excellence
leaders
nation
shared
activity
dollars
problem
courage
slave
self
solution
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