Quotes About Character

Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.

I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.

Actions and words are judged by reputations, and not the other way around.

Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.

The liberality of the age, or in other words the weakening of the obstinate prejudice, which makes men unable to see what is before their eyes because it is contrary to their expectations, has caused it to be very commonly admitted that a Deist may be truly religious: but if religion stands for any graces of character and not for mere dogma, the assertion may equally be made of many whose belief is far short of Deism.

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven—except as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium, or (as Tertullian thought) continual relish in the torture of others.

A high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

while courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.

By these last-minute improvisations, he had, without calling any undue attention to the fact, become the first president to play the race card both ways—once traditionally and once, so to speak, in reverse. His opportunist defenders, having helped him with a reversible chameleonlike change in the color of his skin, still found themselves stuck with the content of his character.

Cuanto peor es el infractor, más devoto resulta ser.

In fact, surveying the natural order, John Stuart Mill was far nearer the mark when he wrote: If a tenth of the pains taken in finding signs of an all-powerful benevolent god had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the creator's character, what scope would not have been found in the animal kingdom? It is divided into devourers and devoured, most creatures being lavishly fitted with instruments to torment their prey.

I suppose you've decided I'm a dirty old man?

The people most reluctant to use weapons are the ones who can best be trusted with them.

Virtue is the fount whence honor springs.

But that I am by nature phlegmatic, slow to wrath, and prone to lechery (to love, I would say)

What virtue is it that is born with us? Much less can honor be ascribed thereto, Honor is purchased by the deeds we do. Believe me, Hero, honor is not won, Until some honorable deed be done. ----From "Hero and Leander, Sestiad I

It was sometimes difficult to reconcile a man's talents with his personality.

What is character, if not a man's measure of himself against his friends and enemies?

I've known him for seventy years. I'll vouch for his lack of character

You don't have to explain why a character pulled the kid from the freezing river, but there better be a pretty good reason why he held that kid under.

A Beta Male is trustworthy: your girlfriend is generally in safe hands with a Beta Male friend, unless, of course, she is a complete slut.

You've always been broken, love, it's the crux of your character.

When you teach them-teach them not to fear. Fear is good in small amounts, but when it is a constant, pounding companion, it cuts away at who you are and makes it hard to do what you know is right.

I didn't think I would ever meet a noble who wasn't corrupt. Now that I have, I find that I prefer them when they're greedy bastards. (Brom to Eragon)