John W. Gardner
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"John William Gardner", was United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare/Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President of the United States/President Lyndon Johnson. During World War II he served in the United States Marine Corps as a captain. In 1955 he became president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and, concurrently, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He was also the founder of two influential national U.S. organizations: Common Cause and Independent Sector. He authored books on improving leadership in American society and other subjects. He was also the founder of two prestigious fellowship programs, The White House Fellowship and The John Gardner Fellowship Program/The John Gardner Fellowship at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1966 Gardner was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the United States National Academy of Sciences/National Academy of Sciences.

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Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.

It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.

The judges did a pretty good job of finding the weak points of both sides' arguments. I was a little surprised at how tough the panel was on the government.

If you don't give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he'll make plenty when he gets to college.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.

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.

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.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

As the market has risen, a lot of people are probably over-invested in stocks. You can sell some stocks and buy bonds, mutual funds or CDs that are less risky.

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.

One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.

He has had phenomenal impact on amateur hockey.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

A lot of our clients are older and have been trading up in homes, but as their kids move out they're reluctant to 'buy down' because of capital gains. This [provision] is getting a lot of interest.

Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

I didn't believe it at first. The league shouldn't have to have a rule for something like this. It is called ethics and integrity.

This is a facility run by skilled people and you won't get that expertise anywhere else.

Lenox Township has 1,300 homes right now. We think some time in the next 10 years we'll build about 4,000 homes. We should see a 400-home increase in just the next few years.

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.