Characteristics Quotes - Page 39

• Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York.

  Fritz Leiber

  New York, Gun, Cities

  Fritz Leiber, Fred Gambino (1979). “Ship of Shadows”

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• If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.

  Paul Johnson

  Unique, Views, Racism

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• Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other. Love is an echo in the feelings of a unity subsisting between two persons which is founded both on likeness and on complementary differences. Without the likeness there would be no attraction; without the challenge of the complementary differences there could not be the closer interweaving and the inextinguishable mutual interest which is the characteristic of all deeper relationships.

  Felix Adler

  Fashion, Love Is, Two

  "Life and Destiny". Book by Felix Adler, 1903.

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• Robert Creely's poems have two main characteristics. 1) They are short; 2) they are not short enough.

  John Simon

  Art, Two, Entertainment

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• I'm an actor, and, beyond that, the thing I do most compulsively is writing. So I come at it very much from this sense of character. I get interested in people. And I feel confident in my capacity to absorb and manifest the characteristics of people. I have a real auditory hang-up for dialogue; re-creating the way people talk really is an addiction in my brain.

  Edward Norton

  Real, Character, Writing

  Interview with Bennett Miller, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 3, 2014.

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• We still dislike hypocrites. It's a very American characteristic. We still like people who have ideas and who are willing to stand up for what they believe in. We're very forgiving of failures and very willing to give people a second and third chance if they mean to do better and are sorry for what they've done.

  David McCullough

  Sorry, Believe, Hypocrite

  Source: belmontvision.com

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• The use of proverbs is characteristic of an unlettered people. They are invaluable treasures to dunces with good memories.

  John Hay

  Memories, People, Use

  John Hay (1897). “Castilian Days”

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• Which are the people who have influenced us most? Not the ones who thought they did, but those who had not the remotest notion that they were influencing us. In the Christian life, the implicit is never conscious, if it is conscious it ceases to have this unaffected loveliness which is the characteristic of the touch of Jesus. We always know when Jesus is at work because He produces in the commonplace something that is inspiring.

  Oswald Chambers

  Christian, Jesus, People

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “My Utmost for His Highest Classic Edition”, p.478, Discovery House

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• The characteristic feature of a free society is that it can function in spite of the fact that its members disagree in many judgments of value. Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Mistake, Mean, Facts

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• Ordinary citizens are so accepting of what is going on, grumbling when their material interests were affected, but seemingly accepting the spiritual poverty so characteristic of today.

  Charles Handy

  Spiritual, Grumbling, Ordinary

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• ...and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of the Englishman.

  R. H. Tawney

  Mean, Political, Democracy

  R. H. Tawney (2016). “Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism”, p.166, Verso Books

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• Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.

  Neil Postman

  Attention, Research, Pay

  Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner (1973). “The school book: for people who want to know what all the hollering is about”

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• Everything that is full of life loves change,
  for the characteristic of life is movement toward a new goal and urges toward new pleasures

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Love Life, Goal, Movement

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• The great virtue of bureaucracy - indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic ~ was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.

  Max Weber

  Government, Defining, Action

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• The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Sacrifice, Often Is, Self

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• The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

  Bertrand Russell

  Technique, Essentials, Tradition

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Scientific Outlook”, p.125, Routledge

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• Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art.

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Giving, Individuality

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.30, New Directions Publishing

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• Technology is the penultimate chameleon, taking on the characteristics of its handler. In some hands technology is a tool of treachery, while in others it morphs into a peaceful protest. In still others, it represents the bleeding edge of freedom.

  Brock N. Meeks

  Technology, Hands, Peaceful

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• The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind,' puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

  Julius Evola

  Thinking, Mind, Kind

  "American 'Civilization'". Essay by Julius Evola (1945), published in his posthumous anthology "Civiltà americana. Scritti sugli Stati Uniti (1930–1968)", 2010.

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• To all organic conceptions of life Americans oppose a mechanistic conception. In a society which has 'started from scratch', everything has the characteristic of being fabricated. In American society appearances are masks, not faces. At the same time, proponents of the American way of life are hostile to personality.

  Julius Evola

  Personality, Scratches, Way

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• We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.

  B. F. Skinner

  Mutation, Reinforcement, Behavior

  B.F Skinner (1965). “Science And Human Behavior”, p.430, Simon and Schuster

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• We will never be able to understand the terrible things that happened between 1933 and 1945 if we deny from the outset that Hitler also had human characteristics, and if we fail to take into account not only his criminal energies, but also the appealing qualities he had.

  Volker Ullrich

  Quality, Energy, Criminals

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• Our Lord’s teaching is always anti-self-realization. His purpose is not the development of a man; His purpose is to make a man exactly like Himself, and the characteristic of the Son of God is self-expenditure.

  Oswald Chambers

  Teaching, Son, Men

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• The assumption that the square of a unit vector
  is positive unity leads to an algebra whose characteristic
  quantities are non-associative.

  Cargill Gilston Knott

  Squares, Unity, Vectors

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• We depend on manly characteristics to keep us safe. Every single one of the dead firemen heroes on 9/11 were men. This was one group where liberals didn't ask why there wasn't a more pleasing gender balance, because the Upper West Side is not fireproof. What happens in combat in some distant field is abstract to liberals, but they can understand the need to have strong, brave men in their fire department.

  Kate O'Beirne

  Strong, Hero, Men

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