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"A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character." John Stuart Mill   "The true drama, and especially the tragedy, calls for the hero to exercise will, to create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us—and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character." David Mamet   "After having described these wretchedly venal servants, who exploit both their masters and their victims, Smith hurries on to say, 'I mean not, however, by any thing which I have here said, to throw any odious imputation upon the general character of the servants of the East India company, and much less upon that of any particular persons. It is the system of government, the situation in which they are placed, that I mean to censure; not the character of those who have acted in it.' So it is social institutions that one should castigate: men respond to these institutions in predictable, and probably unchangeable, ways." George Stigler   "Moral maturity requires engagement with people who think differently. The person who aspires to excellence of mind and character must make an effort to understand why other people think differently about ethical and political questions. The struggle to form a good character gives the morally mature person self-awareness, a proper pride and a proper humility. The self-aware man will realize that another person may have experiences or knowledge that make that person's beliefs, however different from his own, still worthy of respect. He knows that at the root of all serious disagreements are things of value to which each party clings, often for very good reasons. The key to civil compromise is the ability to recognize the value of what others value." James Hankins   "A society of facile comfort produces narrow, petty people, not because, through some kind of spontaneous generation, they are born without character, but because, in the absence of conditions that would allow it to develop, their character remains latent. A society that fears greatness silences its expansive personalities. Incapable of eliminating them, it forgets or shunts them off to the margins. A very long and prosperous peace devoted entirely to material comfort engenders a superficial kind of happiness, the passion for routine, the fierce protection of small advantages. With no other hope than the perpetuation of the ordinary, a people gives itself colorless elites. By what miracle could it be any different?" Chantal Delsol   "All British towns are the growth of centuries. They enshrine local history. They represent the activities, successes, hopes and failures, work and play of the citizens for many generations. The result is 'flavour and character,' though neither the flavour nor the character may appeal at first sight to any but the citizens themselves. Thus shipbuilding, the cotton, the pottery, the mining towns give a very different impression to a visitor when he visits them by himself than when he is shown around by some old resident. There is of course no doubt whatever that many very large areas of British industrial development need regenerating, but it is my strong conviction that this must be done sensitively with and not for or against the citizens themselves." Elizabeth Denby   "The importance of preventing the Low Countries, the military barrier of Europe, from being lost, by being melted down into the general mass of French power, whether by insurrection or by conquest, might enable the British Government to act more promptly upon this, than perhaps upon any other case of an internal character that can be stated. But upon all such cases we must admit ourselves to be, and our allies should in fairness understand that we are, a power that must take our principle of action, and our scale of acting, not merely from the expediency of the case, but from those maxims, which a system of government strongly popular and national in its character, has irresistibly imposed upon us." Robert Stewart   "I suppose a greater mistake was never committed in the world than this wretched Lord Canning's maudlin proclamation about mercy. It would have been bad enough if the Hindus lived in the Strand here, and had the ideas of London vagabonds; but, addressed to the Oriental character, it is hideously absurd and dangerous. I wish I were Commander in Chief over there! I would address that Oriental character which must be powerfully spoken to, in something like the following placard, which should be vigorously translated into all native dialects, 'I, The Inimitable, holding this office of mine, and firmly believing that I hold it by the permission of Heaven and not by the appointment of Satan, have the honor to inform you Hindu gentry that it is my intention, with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with the late abominable atrocities.'" Charles Dickens   "The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can't condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced. (Recounting one such denunciation, David Foster Wallace says a friend called Updike 'just a penis with a thesaurus')." Katie Roiphe   "The slow and difficult advances which tolerance and liberalism have made through long periods of development are dissipated almost in a night when the necessary war-time habits of thought hold the minds of the people. The necessity for a common purpose and a united intellectual front becomes paramount to everything else. But when the need for such a solidarity is past there should be a quick and generous readiness to revert to the old and normal habits of thought. There should be an intellectual demobilization as well as a military demobilization. Progress depends very largely on the encouragement of variety. Whatever tends to standardize the community, to establish fixed and rigid modes of thought, tends to fossilize society. If we all believed the same thing and thought the same thoughts and applied the same valuations to all the occurrences about us, we should reach a state of equilibrium closely akin to an intellectual and spiritual paralysis. It is the ferment of ideas, the clash of disagreeing judgments, the privilege of the individual to develop his own thoughts and shape his own character, that makes progress possible. It is not possible to learn much from those who uniformly agree with us. But many useful things are learned from those who disagree with us; and even when we can gain nothing our differences are likely to do us no harm." Calvin Coolidge   "The most moving thing the theater can show is a character creating himself, the moment of choice, of the free decision which commits him to a moral code and a whole way of life. The situation is an appeal: it surrounds us, offering us solutions which it's up to us to choose. And in order for the decision to be deeply human, in order for it to bring the whole man into play, we have to stage limit situations, that is, situations which present alternatives one of which leads to death. Thus freedom is revealed in its highest degree, since it agrees to lose itself in order to be able to affirm itself. And since there is theater only if all the spectators are united, situations must be found which are so general that they are common to all. Immerse men in these universal and extreme situations which leave them only a couple of ways out, arrange things so that in choosing the way out they choose themselves, and you've won—the play is good." Jean-Paul Sartre   "Rudé Právo, the organ of the Czech Communist Party, said that Slansky and his co-defendants were 'Jewish cosmopolitans, people without a shred of honour, without character, without country, people who desire one thing—career, business and money.' Communists and their supporters imagined a vast Zionist conspiracy reaching from the US Supreme Court to Tito's anti-Stalinist supporters in Yugoslavia. For all that, they maintained that they were not anti-Semites but enemies of Zionism." Nick Cohen   "The most intricate problems must be solved by genius with simplicity, without pretension, with ease; the egg of Christopher Columbus is the emblem of all the discoveries of genius. It only justifies its character as genius by triumphing through simplicity over all the complications of art. It does not proceed according to known principles, but by feelings and inspiration; the sallies of genius are the inspirations of a God (all that healthy nature produces is divine); its feelings are laws for all time, for all human generations." Friedrich Schiller   "Slavery educates, or draws out, and strengthens, by example and exercise, to an inordinate degree, the natural lust of authority, common as an element of character in all mankind. To a degree, that is, which makes its satisfaction inconvenient and costly—costly of other means of comfort, not only to the individual, but to the community. Thus, a man educated under the system will be disposed no longer than he is forced, by law or otherwise, to employ servants or laborers who may make demands upon him, and if those demands are refused, may in their turn legally refuse to obey him. He will prefer to accept much smaller profits, much greater inconveniences, than would a man otherwise educated, rather than submit to what he considers to be the insolence of a laborer, who maintains a greater self-respect, and demands a greater consideration for his personal dignity, than it is possible for a slave to do." Frederick Law Olmsted   "The real problem in German history is why so few of the educated, civilized classes recognized Hitler as the embodiment of evil. University professors; army officers; businessmen and bankers—these had a background of culture, and even of respect for law. Yet virtually none of them exclaimed: 'This is anti-Christ.' Later, they were to make out that Hitler had deceived them and that the bestial nature of National Socialism could not have been foreseen. This is not true. The real character of National Socialism was exposed by many foreigners, and even by some German observers long before Hitler came to power." Alan John Percivale Taylor   "Suppose there were a television show that made its viewers less generous, less sympathetic, and more violent toward those who think differently. It's safe to say that you'd have a moral obligation to avoid that show unless you had a very powerful reason to watch it. Generally speaking, we have a moral obligation to avoid doing things that worsen our moral character. And politics tends to do just that." Christopher Freiman   "The reality of having to fight for its existence almost from the moment of its birth prevented the Confederacy from retaining the distinctive features of the Old South. First, to create an effective army through conscription, whose soldiers could march wherever necessary under a unified command, it had to abridge the very same states' rights that had helped motivate secession in the first place. Second, it had to divert agricultural energies into growing more food and less cotton. Third, it had to industrialize as quickly as possible in light of the mechanized character of modern warfare and to intervene in the market to promote economic efficiency. Fourth, the exigencies of war led to the transformation of traditional social roles, relationships, and gender roles; as men went off to fight, women had to take on more roles than ever before. And fifth, before long the Confederacy, like the union, had to suspend habeas corpus and other citizens' civil rights." Patrick Allitt   "By having separated the arts of the clothier and the tanner, we are the better supplied with shoes and with cloth. But to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to improve." Adam Ferguson   "To be on the popular side at the moment is not especially interesting; the thing is to be on the right side in the long run. As I see it, the best argument for free speech is what the suppression of it does to the character of a people." Albert Jay Nock   "It used to be commonplace for men to parade city streets with sandwich boards proclaiming 'The End of the World is at Hand!' They have been replaced by a throng of sober people, scientists, philosophers, and politicians, proclaiming that there are more subtle calamities just around the comer. The human race, they say, is in danger of strangling itself by overbreeding, of poisoning itself with pollution, of undermining its essential human character by tampering with heredity and of perverting the whole basis of society with too much prosperity." John Maddox