Characteristics Quotes - Page 17

• For it is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things.

  Christopher Ricks

  Simplicity, Good Man, May

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• In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.

  Jane Goodall

  Kindness, Thinking, Rights

  "The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity". Book by Paola Cavalieri, Peter Singer, 1996.

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• Certain characteristics of the subject are clear. To begin with, we do not in this subject deal with particular things or particular properties: we deal formally with what can be said about any thing or any property. We are prepared to say that one and one are two, but not that Socrates and Plato are two.

  Bertrand Russell

  Plato, Two, Preparation

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.150, Routledge

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• Trust is probably the intangible, and cultivated of all characteristic.

  Timothy Mason

  Trust, Intangible

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• Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Mean, Men

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.24, Anchor

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• The devils of past religions have always, at least in part, had animal characteristics, evidence of man's constant need to deny that he too is an animal, for to do so would serve a mighty blow to his impoverished ego.

  Anton Szandor LaVey

  Animal, Blow, Past

  "The Satanic Bible". Book by Anton Szandor LaVey, 1969.

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• Brisk and prompt to war, soft and not in the least able to resist calamity, fickle in catching at schemes, and always striving after novelties - French characteristics remained unaltered twenty centuries after Julius Caesar made a note of them for all time.

  Frederick Rolfe

  War, Twenties, Fickle

  "Hadrian the Seventh" by Frederick Rolfe, Penguin Modern Classics edition, Harmondsworth, (p. 58), 1963.

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• No one can do inspired work without genuine interest in his subject and understanding of its characteristics.

  Andreas Feininger

  Photography, Understanding, Photographer

  Andreas Feininger (1952). “Advanced photography: methods and conclusions”

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• As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture.

  Leon Trotsky

  Animal, Reality, Men

  "Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky".

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• Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.

  David G. Hartwell

  Literary Genre, Fiction, Century

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• Manchester has everything but good looks..., the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery.

  A. J. P. Taylor

  Vices, Looks, England

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• Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most peculiar characteristics. Knowledge in Latin is scientia, and science came to be the name of the most respectable kind of knowledge.

  Imre Lakatos

  Latin, Men, Names

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• Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments...Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.

  Bill Mollison

  Country, Animal, Cities

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• The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

  Carroll Quigley

  War, Compassion, Men

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• If I had to name the single characteristic shared by all truly successful individuals, I’d say it’s the ability to create and nurture a network of contacts.

  Harvey Mackay

  Successful, Names, Individual

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• Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring.

  Al-Jahiz

  Struggle, Successful, Animal

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• It’s one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he’s leading to realize whatever he’s dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, ‘I have a dream. Of course, I’m not sure they’ll be up to it.

  Benjamin Zander

  Dream, Kings, People

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• Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Stress, Math, Perfect

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”

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• I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long periods of time.

  Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

  Time, Lying, Cat

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• Warren Berger’s book is a cure for a disease in large enterprises. A More Beautiful Question provides a framework to help leaders ask the most important questions—which is one of the most fundamental characteristics of a great leader—while sharing inspiring stories to show the incredible power of this concept.

  Jim Stengel

  Beautiful, Book, Leader

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• Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

  James W. Loewen

  White, Columbus, Cherish

  James W. Loewen (2013). “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, p.83, The New Press

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• I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.

  Anna Julia Cooper

  Country, Destiny, Blood

  Anna Julia Cooper, Charles C. Lemert, Esme Bhan (1998). “The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters”, p.202, Rowman & Littlefield

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• We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.

  Abraham Flexner

  Sex, America, Race

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• I have tried to show as clearly as possible that the very characteristics and weaknesses of temperament with which we were born...can be transformed into their exact opposites and can therefore produce in us the loveliest of all qualities.

  Hannah Hurnard

  Opposites, Quality, Weakness

  Hannah Hurnard (2012). “Mountains of Spices”, p.258, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

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• The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.

  Anthony Storr

  Imagination, Missing, Desire

  Anthony Storr (2015). “Solitude a Return to the Self”, p.197, Simon and Schuster

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