Characteristic Quotes

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. (Henry David Thoreau)
A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples. View quote
Emily Greene Balch
It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment. View quote
Freeman Dyson
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
I find that moral courage is the most valuable and most usually absent characteristic. View quote
George S. Patton
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility. View quote
Emil Cioran
There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. View quote
Warren Buffett
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. View quote
Sigmund Freud
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. View quote
John Maynard Keynes
It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played. View quote
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology. (Emily Greene Balch)
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity of Spencer, remoteness of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything. View quote
William Hazlitt
There are many qualities that make a great leader but having strong beliefs, being able to stick with them through popular and unpopular times, is the most important characteristic of a great leader. View quote
Rudy Giuliani
It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works. View quote
Isaac Asimov
Alfred Nobel's discoveries are characteristic; powerful explosives can help men perform admirable tasks. They are also a means to terrible destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead peoples to war. View quote
Pierre Curie
Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit. View quote
Robertson Davies
To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws. View quote
Eric Hoffer
Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. View quote
Margaret Thatcher
I am positive that flexibility is a feminine characteristic. View quote
Emma Bonino
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings. View quote
Rollo May
It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world. (Alain de Botton)
The truth is, however, that every religion form is superior to the others in a particular respect, and it is this characteristic that in fact indicates the sufficient reason for the existence of that form. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort. View quote
John Forbes Nash
I don't think that modesty is the outstanding characteristic of contemporary politics, do you?" View quote
Edward Heath
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. View quote
Thomas Carlyle