The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time has been extended to fashions of reading. One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to b...
Dependability, integrity, the characteristic of never knowingly doing anything wrong, that you would never cheat anyone, that you would give everybody a fair deal. Character is a sort of an all-inclusive thing. If a man has character, everyone has co...
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 diseas...
With characteristic lack of false modesty, John once said to me, "My looks are a rough test of people. If they don't begin to see me beautiful when they have had a chance to learn, I know they're dead inside, and dangerous.
The dominant characteristic of an authentic spiritual life is the gratitude that flows from trust - not only for all the gifts that I receive from God, but gratitude for all the suffering. Because in that purifying experience, suffering has often bee...
Now we have technology where we can modify the genomics of individuals by gene transfer and genetic meddling, we may find that people will want to modify their children, enhance their intelligence, their strength and their beauty and all the other so...
Every hope of successive generations of scholars that order might be constructed from the chaotic mess of medical nomenclature has been frustrated. Even diseases recognized in the same historical period have been given names based on characteristics ...
War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.
Just as our solar system has a certain idiosyncratic assortment of planets and moons, different from any neighboring system yet categorically equivalent, so each distinct period of human history might have special qualities and individuals, character...
There are certain characteristics that define a good chimp mother. She is patient, she is protective but she is not over-protective - that is really important. She is tolerant, but she can impose discipline. She is affectionate. She plays. And the mo...
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books...
You cannot have two foundations. Either you stand and act from your heart and soul, or your life will flow from the animal soul, the nafs, your lust and greed and forgetfulness, which are characteristics of what dies and does not surrender to receive...
In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a char...
By intensity of hatred, nations create in themselves the character that they imagine in their enemies. Hence it comes that all passionate conflicts result in an interchange of characteristics. We might say with truth, those who hate open a door by wh...
Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in li...
I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a gr...
Since Lenin died, every Soviet leader had been a liar. They had all glossed over what was wrong and declined to acknowledge reality. The most striking characteristic of Soviet leadership for the last sixty-five year was the refusal to face facts.(107...
Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.
This intriguing 'somewhere else,' where intelligence no longer matters and awareness melts away, commands us to cherish our remains of innocence -- because of all the characteristics of human nature, the richest by far is passion for the perfectly us...
And Kelsea wondered suddenly whether humanity ever actually changed. Did people grow and learn at all as the centuries past? Or was humanity merely like the tide, enlightenment advancing and then retreating as circumstances shifted? The most defining...
When you speak, be sure of what you are speaking. Don't be rambling full of words that have no integrity or truth. Nobody wants to confide in you when they doubt what you say. If you are filled with untruths, those characteristics make it hard for an...
