Quotes about personality
page 68

Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“For it is not enough just to give men rights. They must be able to use those rights in their personal pursuit of happiness.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Voting Rights Act signing speech (1965)

Stephen Leacock photo

“The biological organism and the social persona are profoundly different social constructions. The different systems of social practices, including discourse practices, through which these two notions are constituted, have their meanings, and are made use of, are radically incommensurable. The biological notion of a human organism as an identifiable individual unit of analysis depends on the specific scientific practices we use to construct the identity, the boundedness, the integrity, and the continuity across interactions of this unit. The criteria we use to do so: DNA signatures, neural micro-anatomy, organism-environment boundaries, internal physiological interdependence of subsystems, external physical probes of identification at distinct moments of physical time -- all depend on social practices and discourses profoundly different from those in terms of which we define the social person.
The social-biographical person is also an individual insofar as we construct its identity, boundedness, integrity, and continuity. But the social practices and discourses we deploy in these constructions are quite different. We define the social person in terms of social interactions, social roles, socially and culturally meaningful behavior patterns. We construct from these notions of the personal identity of an individual the separateness and independence of that individual from the social environment with which it transacts, the internal unity or integrity of the individual as a consistent persona, and the continuity of that persona across social interactions.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 68

Leo Ryan photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Big Miniature http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21376/Big_Miniature
From the poems written in English

Jesse Ventura photo

“Every fat person says it's not their fault, that they have gland trouble. You know which gland? The saliva gland. They can't push away from the table.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Interview in Playboy (November 1999)

Vera Farmiga photo

“I found I was really comfortable taking on a different personality. It saved me from myself, in a way.”

Vera Farmiga (1973) American actress

On choosing to become an actor, as quoted in " Scared No More http://www.backstage.com/news/scared-no-more/" by Jenelle Riley at Backstage (March 2, 2006)

Camille Paglia photo
Sofía Sisniega photo
Gustav Radbruch photo
Ellsworth Kelly photo
Elia M. Ramollah photo
Margaret Fuller photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Arthur James Balfour photo

“Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Theism and humanism

Samuel Adams photo

“!-- A motion was made and seconded, that the report of the Committee made on Monday last, be amended, so far as to add the following to the first article therein mentioned, viz.: ' -->And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of time press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless when necessary for the defence of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Rejected resolution for a clause to add to the first article of the U.S. Constitution, in the debates of the Massachusetts Convention of 1788 (6 February 1788); this has often been attributed to Adams, but he is nowhere identified as the person making the resolution in Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Held in the year 1788 And which finally ratified the Constitution of the United States. (1856) p. 86. https://archive.org/details/debatesandproce00peirgoog<!-- Printed by the Resolves of the Legislature, 1856. Boston: William White, Printer of the Commonwealth.
Variant: The said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of The United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms...
As quoted in Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1850) edited by Peirce & Hale
Disputed

Sam Harris photo
Heidi Klum photo

“I am not that person who walks in a room with my nose in the sky. I smile at people when I meet them, and I like photos of me when I'm smiling because they show my personality. I am always trying to have fun.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Interview by Kate Sullivan for Allure, April 2010

Preston Manning photo
Jerry Coyne photo
Alfred de Zayas photo

“Among the rights that States must ensure are the rights to life, security of person, participation in the conduct of public affairs, homeland, movement, health, education, employment and social security”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the adverse impacts of free trade and investment agreements on a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx.
2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

Jim Henson photo

“Personally, I prefer working in the background.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Interview with Copley News Service (1976)

Edward Bernays photo
M. S. Swaminathan photo
Alberto Gonzales photo
Umberto Boccioni photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“I do not care a button about having my name in any blessed place. I was never ardent about fame even in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people without their knowing it and get things done. It was the confounded British Government that spoiled my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly known and a 'leader'. Then, again, I don't believe in advertisement except for books etc., and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom' and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere… or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the 'religions' and is the reason of their failure. If I tolerate a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient counter-weight in that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would defeat that object. I am perfectly 'rational', I assure you, in my methods and I do not proceed merely on any personal dislike of fame. If and so far as publicity serves the Truth, I am quite ready to tolerate it; but I do not find publicity for its own sake desirable.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

October 2, 1934
India's Rebirth

Leo Tolstoy photo
Francis Escudero photo
Ray Comfort photo

“So, a talking parrot, three hundred people flying through the sky in a big tin can called a 747, a human being growing inside another person, and men walking on the moon don't contradict logic?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

Charles Sanders Peirce photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo

“[S]laves are never referred to in the Constitution as anything but 'persons', a characterization that is perfectly neutral as to race or sex. That some of these persons were slaves was something arising from state law, not from the Constitution itself.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 211

Margaret Cho photo
Ryū Murakami photo
Charles Evans Hughes photo
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel photo

“Only he who possesses a personal religion, an original view of infinity, can be an artist.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Nur derjenige kann ein Künstler seyn, welcher eine eigne Religion, eine originelle Ansicht des Unendlichen hat.
“Selected Ideas (1799-1800)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #13

George Holmes Howison photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Elton Mayo photo

“One friend, one person who is truly understanding, who takes the trouble to listen to us as we consider our problem, can change our whole outlook on the world.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Elton Mayo, cited in: Edward William Bok (1947), Ladies' Home Journal.Vol. 64, p. 246

Doug McIlroy photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Robert M. Pirsig photo
Vanessa L. Williams photo

“I am lucky to have three daughters who are completely different. I look at my daughters and I have different relationships with all three and there are parts of each personality that are very special.”

Vanessa L. Williams (1963) American actress, singer and former Miss America

Vanessa Williams reflects on motherhood, struggle and stardom (May 9, 2012)

“As the largest grassroots effort in the history of the world, file trading is essentially the average person's way of saying we don't agree with the status quo.”

Richard Menta American journalist

Source RIAA and MPAA sue Morpheus, Grokster and KaZaa http://web.archive.org/web/20020803182858/www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/sue_morpheus.html - 10/03/2001
Quotes from the MP3 Newswire

Shimon Peres photo
Margaret Sanger photo
Stig Dagerman photo
Judith Sheindlin photo

“First of all, no one can accuse me, Ayad Jamal Aldin, of secatarianism, because I support a secular regime that fully separates religion and the state. […] I believe that my freedom as a Shia and as a religious person will never be complete unless I preserve the freedom of the Sunni, the Christian, the Jew, the Sabai and the Yazidi. We will not be able to preserve the freedom of the mosque unless we preserve the freedom of entertainment clubs. […] The curricula - both the modern ones, in some Arab and Islamic countries, and the books of jurisprudence and heritage - have many flaws that must be fixed once and for all. There are rulings about Ahl al-Dhimma - even if, Allah be praised, no current regime can enforce these rulings. However, just for the sake of amusement and diversion, I recommend that the viewers read the books of jurisprudence, and see how Ahl al-Dhimma are treated. I especially recommend this to people with a lust for Arab and Islamic history, who claim that our history is a source of pride, and that others were treated with kindness and love - especially Christians and Jews. Among these rulings, a Dhimmi must wear a belt, so he would be identifiable. Moreover, it is recommended that he be forced to the narrowest paths, and there are even jurisprudents who say that it is recommended to slap a Christian on the back of his neck so he would feel humiliated and degraded. This is how we harass him and then invite him to join Islam. I can swear that the Prophet Muhammad is innocent of such inhuman jurisprudence. I challenge anyone among the people with a lust for history to talk candidly to the West, to the advocates of human rights, and tell them that our heritage has such evils and flaws. We are a nation of blackout and darkness. We cannot live in the light of day. […] We do not hold ourselves accountable. This is why America came to demand that the Arabs be accountable. We must have more self-confidence and be accountable before others hold us accountable. We must discipline ourselves before the Americans and English discipline us. We must maintain human rights, which we have neglected for 1,300 or 1,400 years, to this day - until the arrival of the Americans, the Christians, the English, the Zionists, the Crusaders - call them what you will. They came to teach you, the followers of Muhammad, how to respect human rights.”

Iyad Jamal Al-Din (1961) Iraqi politician

Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: The Arabs Want Tyrannical Regimes, in Line with Their Backward Culture, LBC TV, July 31, 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_ZKffu6Wsg,

Gerald Ford photo

“I am the first to admit that I am no great orator or no person that got where I have gotten by any William Jennings Bryan technique.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

Interview in TIME magazine (2 February 1976)
1970s

Jerry Falwell photo

“And the fact that John Kerry would not support a federal marriage amendment [prohibiting gay marriage], it equates in our minds as someone 150 years ago saying I'm personally opposed to slavery, but if my neighbor wants to own one or two that's OK. We don't buy that.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

CNN : Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/03/acd.01.html (3 November 2004)

Max Horkheimer photo
Jay Leiderman photo

““He is a good person. He did a bad thing,” Leiderman told the judge.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As stated in, A Simple Phrase From a Sentencing Hearing in a Difficult High-Profile Case. http://jayleiderman.com/blog/jay-leiderman-quoted-part-9-a-simple-phrase-from-a-difficult-high-profile-case/
Variant: He is a good person. He did a bad thing.

Montesquieu photo

“The laws of Rome had wisely divided public power among a large number of magistracies, which supported, checked and tempered each other. Since they all had only limited power, every citizen was qualified for them, and the people — seeing many persons pass before them one after the other — did not grow accustomed to any in particular. But in these times the system of the republic changed. Through the people the most powerful men gave themselves extraordinary commissions — which destroyed the authority of the people and magistrates, and placed all great matters in the hands of one man, or a few.”

Source: Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence/11 - Wikisource, fr.wikisource.org, fr, 2018-07-07 https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Consid%C3%A9rations_sur_les_causes_de_la_grandeur_des_Romains_et_de_leur_d%C3%A9cadence/11,
Source: Montesquieu, Causes of the Greatness of the Romans, 2017-11-09, 2018-07-07 https://web.archive.org/web/20171109014358/http://www.constitution.org/cm/ccgrd_l.htm,
Source: Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1876), Chapter XI.

Swami Vivekananda photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Andrea Dworkin photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Florence Nightingale photo
Samuel R. Delany photo

“The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 3, Groups, Societies, and Civilizations, p. 67

Hariprasad Chaurasia photo

“Jesus Christ is personally unknown to the vast masses of men on all continents. His influence is limited by the failure and indifference of his professed followers.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 58

Alan Hirsch photo

“Associated with each office is a set of activities, which are defined as potential behaviors. These activities constitute the role to be performed, at least approximately, by any person who occupies that office.”

Robert L. Kahn (1918–2019) American psychologist

Source: Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity, 1964, p. 13: Definition of the term role.

John Cage photo
Andrew Dickson White photo
Hilary Duff photo
Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) photo
Thomas Robert Malthus photo
Gianfranco Fini photo

“Times are ripe to discuss about the vote right, at least on an administrative level, for immigrant persons.”

Gianfranco Fini (1952) Italian politician

Corriere della Sera, Fini: diamo il diritto di voto agli immigrati http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Politica/2003/10_Ottobre/07/fini.shtml, 7 October 2003.

Samuel R. Delany photo
Paul Klee photo
Joseph Priestley photo
Adrianne Wadewitz photo

“Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience - that radical switch and growth”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Wadewitz, Adrianne. (August 12, 2013). "What I learned as the worst student in the class" http://www.hastac.org/blogs/wadewitz/2013/08/12/what-i-learned-worst-student-class. HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance Collaboratory. — reprinted and cited in: "How Adrianne Wadewitz learnt to embrace failure" http://www.smh.com.au/world/how-adrianne-wadewitz-learnt-to-embrace-failure-20140425-zqzgx.html. The Sydney Morning Herald. April 25, 2014. Retrieved April 25, 2014.

David Souter photo
Donald Barthelme photo

“For our people to have lived together for one and a quarter century it is difficult to believe that at a personal level so little cultural transfers have taken place.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Guest speech to the conference of the Fiji Labour Party, Lautoka, 30 July 2005

Peter Atkins photo
Marvin Minsky photo
Jesse Ventura photo
Andrei Lankov photo

“Right now, no sane and unbiased person would be so stupid as to doubt that the North Korean state is very repressive.”

Andrei Lankov (1963) Russian academic

The Folly of an Inter-Korean Confederation (October 2015)

Francis Crick photo
Luboš Motl photo

“In 1980 I was a red kid and no one could have said anything bad about the Soviet Union. At least this is how my grandfather used to remember me. Around 1981, I became a pro-capitalist person and it stuck.”

Luboš Motl (1973) Czech physicist and translator

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/06/helmut-schmidt-on-global-warming.html
The Reference Frame http://motls.blogspot.com/

Chris Quigg photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Ernest Barnes photo
Jane Roberts photo
Susan Cain photo
Adam Smith photo
Fred Astaire photo