Quotes about characteristic
page 9

“The slow decline of Christianity prepared the way for new Utopias and doomsdays. Indeed some of the new views of the future contained many of the characteristics of a religion.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750-2000 (1988)

Religion, Way, Future

“For my own part I am deeply convinced that all excess in the public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste—for that is a comparatively trifling matter—but a great political and a great moral evil. It is a characteristic of the mischief which arise from financial prodigality, that they creep onwards with a noiseless and surreptitious step; that they are unseen and unfelt until they have reached a magnitude absolutely overwhelming, and then at length, we see them, as perhaps they now exist in the case of one at least among the great European nations, so fearful and menacing in their aspect that they seem to threaten the very foundations of national existence.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1861/apr/15/first-night#column_595 in the House of Commons (15 April 1861) <br class="br">1860s

Fear, Evil, Parting, Country

“It is the universal hope of rising in the social scale which is the key to much of the superiority that is visible in this country. It accounts for the orderly self-respect which is the great characteristic of the masses in the United States. ... All this tends to the argument that the political condition of a people is very much dependent on its economical fate.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to John Bright during his visit to the United States (1858), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden [1879] (1905), p. 688
1850s

Fate, People, Hope, Universe

“Even in physics, there is no infallible procedure for generating reliable knowledge. The calm order and perfection of well-established theories, accredited by innumerable items of evidence from a thousand different hands, eyes and brains, is not characteristic of the front-line of research, where controversy, conjecture, contradiction and confusion are rife. The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false. The scientific system is as much involved in distilling the former out of the latter as it is in creating and transferring more and more bits of data and items of 'information'.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) New Zealand physicist

John Ziman in "Reliable Knowledge: an Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science" (1978)

Books, Knowledge, Perfection, Falseness

“Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.
Love is an echo in the feelings of a unity subsisting between two persons which is founded both on likeness and on complementary differences. Without the likeness there would be no attraction; without the challenge of the complementary differences there could not be the closer interweaving and the inextinguishable mutual interest which is the characteristic of all deeper relationships.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 5 : Love and Marriage
Life and Destiny (1913)

Love, Making love, Feeling, Fashion

“A serious difficulty in understanding how to educate and regulate the relations of sex arises from the fact that it is the relation of two equal but distinct halves of the human race, and exists in the dual form—male and female. Unless the distinctive characteristics and requirements of each of these equal halves are fully understood, the relation between them cannot be satisfactory.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

p. 8 https://books.google.com/books?id=7VlHAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=snippet&q=regulate&f=false <br class="br">Essays in Medical Sociology (1899)

Education, Sex, Understanding, Relation ships

“The essence of all religions is the recognition of an Authority higher, more comprehensive, more permanent than the human being. The characteristic of Christian teaching, however, is the faith that this Supreme Authority is beneficent as well as powerful. The Christian believes that the Creative Force is a moral force, of more comprehensive morality than the human being that it creates. Under the symbol of a wise and loving parent—the most just, efficient, and attractive image that we know of—we are encouraged to regard this unseen Authority as being in direct relation with every atom of creation, and as desirous of drawing each atom into progressively higher forms of existence.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

[Elizabeth Blackwell, Essays in Medical Sociology, https://books.google.com/books?id=7VlHAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=religions&f=false, 1, 1899, Library Reprints, Incorporated, 978-0-7222-1823-5]
Essays in Medical Sociology (1899)

Love, Making love, Faith, Religion

“Big talkers have a greater tendency to compromise you than the string, silent types who aren't so eager to transmit the latest insider gossip. You have to think about those characteristics.”

William G. Boykin (1948) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Source: Man to Man: Rediscovering Masculinity in a Challenging World (2020), p. 118

Thinking

“One of the peculiar characteristics of music is that it is both the most natural and least artificial of the arts, and as well the most complicated and subtle.”

Walter Raymond Spalding (1865–1962) American music pedagogue and author

Page 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=pQARAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA3. <br class="br">Music: An Art and a Language (1920), Preliminary Considerations (Ch. I)

Art, Music, Nature

“There are three characteristics that attract kindness: being fair in dealing with others, being helpful when others are in hardships and bearing a truly compassionate heart.”

Muhammad al-Taqi (811–835) ninth of the Twelve Imams of Twelver Shi'ism

[Mizan al-Hikmah, Muhammadi Reishahri, Muhammad, Dar al-Hadith, 2010, 2, Qum, 414]

Help, Heart

“One of our national characteristics is not to do things without careful deliberation. Those who are privileged to direct the aspirations of a quarter of the world’s population have a wonderful opportunity but a fearful responsibility.”

Soong Mei-ling (1897–2003) Chiang Kai-shek's wife, First Lady of the Republic of China

China Emergent (May 1942)

World, Fear

“The last child must inherit all the great attributes of his elders, then add in some of his own characteristics to be completely unique from the rest.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“A People which is content with its homeland and which shreds at even the shadow of a conflict lacks the characteristics of a superior race.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

Source: BBC Documentary based on Adam Hochschild's 'King Leopold's Ghost'
Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death

People

“No matter how the conomy and sociology of the neighbouring sectors of the Galaxy changes, there was always an elite; and it is always the characteristic of an elite that it possesses leisure as the great reward of its elite-hood.”

Isaac Asimov book Second Foundation

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Second Foundation (1953), Chapter 12 "Lord"

Change

“The media of the technological age have very different characteristics. Their content is the Insignificant, the "news."”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Tomorrow it will no longer have the least interest. There is even good reason to believe that there is no interest at the time of the event. The medium is the televised image, instead of the permanent to which one must return in order to grow on one's own. It continually falls into a nothingness from which it will never be able to leave. The media world thus does not offer a self-realization of life; it offers escape. For all those whose laziness represses their energy and thus always leaves them discontent with themselves, it offers the opportunity to forget about their discontent. This forgetting recurs at each moment with each new rise of Force and Desire. Each weekend, students from the Parisian suburbs spend an average of twenty-one hours in front of their televisions, just like their teachers. At least they will have something to talk about the next day.
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)
Source: Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 141

Age

“We find ourselves in a time of global uncertainty and in such a time are called to offer the common man Christian hope, perspective for the future and faith in eternity. The people of today actually hunger the most for God. They seek solace in various surrogates and, therefore, experience disappointment. Nothing can give man meaning and peace except God. The Church should open its doors to all people. We Greek Catholics, with our mystical spirituality, ecclesiastical tradition and the wealth of our liturgy, can and should offer the living Christ, his joy, love, forgiveness and hope to the people around us in our own characteristic way. With great hope, I look toward the future of our Eparchy of Križevci and anticipate days of spiritual revival. Whoever truly wants to follow Christ will inevitably encounter resistance and persecution from the world. However, let us not lose hope. With God we are always in the majority and always on the winning side. May our many holy ancestors be our role models and support us on this path.”

Milan Stipić (1978) Croatian Greek-Catholic bishop

Source: The Episcopal Ordination of Msgr. Milan Stipić as the Bishop of Križevci https://ika.hkm.hr/english/the-episcopal-ordination-of-msgr-milan-stipic-as-the-bishop-of-krizevci/ (October 2020)

Love, Hunger, God, People

“The mission is of God, it is not ours. We are simply the instruments of God. Within the Church, one of the characteristics of the missionary, and especially of the religious – for I myself am also a religious – is itinerancy. We are never fixed in one place, but are transferred wherever the Church needs us, wherever God sends us, which is why we must always be ready to dismantle our tent and set it up again elsewhere.”

Luiz Fernando Lisboa (1955) 21st-century Brazilian Catholic bishop

Source: Mozambique: the last three years have been “an experience of the cross” https://acninternational.org/mozambique-the-last-three-years-have-been-an-experience-of-the-cross/ (25 February 2021)

God

“To want good things even for the wicked is a characteristic of saints.”

Guigo I (1083–1136) Cartusian monk

#127
The Meditations of Guigo I, Prior of the Charterhouse

“Power’s tendency to corrupt is a function of the work it does in liberating man’s worse characteristics.”

A. C. Grayling (1949) English philosopher

Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), Chapter 25, “Power” (p. 105)

Quotes about characteristic page 9

Quotes about characteristic
page 9