Quotes about trait (264 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them - certain traits, certain places where you don’t let the world go.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

World , Childhood

“As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Parent

“Or rather, I inherited the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and damned by it, as they say at the race track — damned in more ways than one.”

Eugene O'Neill The Hairy Ape

Mildred: Scene 2
The Hairy Ape (1922)

Way , Wealth

“Questions about arts, traits, and styles of life are actually quite technical. They ask us to explain what happens among the agents of our minds.”

Marvin Minsky book Society of Mind

Source: The Society of Mind (1987), Ch.2
Context: Questions about arts, traits, and styles of life are actually quite technical. They ask us to explain what happens among the agents of our minds. But this is a subject about which we have never learned very much... Such questions will be answered in time. But it will just prolong the wait if we keep using pseudo-explanation words like "holistic" and "gestalt." …It's harmful, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close.

Life , Art , Question

“The pursuit of success is marked by numerous characteristics; including, perseverance, commitment, education, and wisdom, to name a few. The road to failure can also be described with countless personality traits, including, unreliable, indolence, ignorance, and ineptitude.
However, during my thirty years as an administrator I have witnessed the most significant rationale for failure that cannot be described in a single word. It is a characteristic some people possess, often referred to by psychologists as the, need-to-be-liked-syndrome. Unfortunately, for some, their existence is predicated upon pleasing others, and seeking approval and recognition. They have become an inmate or prisoner to the thoughts and opinions of others.
In other words, they lack self-value, and therefore must receive it from others. When you do not value yourself, then it will be difficult to obtain joy and contentment in one’s life. Remember; you have worth and value.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1997

Success , Personality , People , Failure

“One who possesses arrogance as a dominant personality trait, rarely has close friends.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1989

Personality

“To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 158
The Gay Science (1882)
Context: To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

“I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

Study , Animals

“Love brings to light a lover's noble and hidden qualities-his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive of his normal qualities.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Love , Lovers , Light

“The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Joy

“We know that self-government is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our children's children. To do so we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Inaugural Address (1905)

Life , Men , Children , People

“Fight to preserve these traits of civilization, that made us go forward.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

Source: Asked about sense of conservatism, blog, 6 March 2008

Fight

“One of the things you want to do with a conception like compassion is that you want to start thinking about it like a psychologist, or like a scientist, because compassion is actually definable. The easiest way to approach it is to think about it in Big-5 terms, because it maps onto Agreeableness, which you can break down into Compassion and Politeness. The liberal types, especially the Social Justice types, are way higher in Compassion. It's actually their fundamental characteristic. You might think, 'well, compassion is a virtue.' Yes, it's a virtue, but any uni-dimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice, because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially. Compassion can be great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes. So if you're a crying child, hey great. But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out. Compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs while she eats you because you got in the way. We don't want to be thinking for a second that compassion isn't a virtue that can lead to violence, because it certainly can. The other problem with compassion - this is why we have conscientiousness - there's five canonical personality dimensions. Agreeableness is good if you are functioning in a kin system. You want to distribute resources equally for example among your children, because you want all of them to have the same chance, and even roughly the same outcome. That is, a good one. But the problem is that you can't extend that moral network to larger groups. As far as I can tell, you need conscientiousness, which is a much colder virtue. It's also a virtue that is much more concerned with larger structures over the longer period of time. And you can think about conscientiousness as a form of compassion too. It's like: 'straighten the hell out, and work hard and your life will go well. I don't care how you feel about that right now.' Someone who's cold, that is, low in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness, will tell you every time. 'Don't come whining to me. I don't care about your hurt feelings. Do your goddamn job or you're going to be out on the street.' One might think, 'Oh that person is being really hard on me.' Not necessarily. They might have your long term best interest in mind. You're fortunate if you come across someone who is disagreeable. Not tyrannically disagreeable, but moderately disagreeable and high in conscientiousness because they will whip you into shape. And that's really helpful. You'll admire people like that. You won't be able to help it. You'll feel like, 'Oh wow, this person has actually given me good information, even though you will feel like a slug after they have taken you apart.' That's the compassion issue. You can't just transform that into a political stance. I think part of what we're seeing is actually the rise of a form of female totalitarianism, because we have no idea what totalitarianism would be like if women ran it, because that's never happened before in the history of the planet. And so, we've introduced women into the political sphere radically over the past fifty years. We have no idea what the consequence of that is going to be. But we do know from our research, which is preliminary, that agreeableness really predicts political correctness, but female gender predicts over and above the personality trait, and that's something we found very rarely in our research. Usually the sex differences are wiped out by the personality differences, but not in this particular case. On top of that, women are getting married later, and they're having children much later, and they're having fewer of them, and so you also have to wonder what their feminine orientation is doing with itself in the interim, roughly speaking. A lot of it is being expressed as political opinion. Fair enough. That's fine. But it's not fine when it starts to shut down discussion.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life , Women , Children , People

“Apart from sex linkage, we know almost nothing at present of linkage in man. Yet it is certain that every defect determined by a single factor must be located in one or other of twenty-three [sic] linkage groups. Each defect must therefore be linked in inheritance with numerous other observable traits, and with some of them is probably linked closely. The search for such linkage will certainly be lengthy, and at first, disappointing.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

Eugenics, academic and practical. Eugenics Review, 27, 95-100, 1935
1930s

Sex , Disappointment , Search

“You know, there’s been a lot of talk in this campaign about what America has lost — people who tell us that our way of life is being undermined by pernicious changes and dark forces beyond our control. They tell voters there’s a “real America” out there that must be restored. This isn’t an idea, by the way, that started with Donald Trump. It’s been peddled by politicians for a long time — probably from the start of our Republic.
And it’s got me thinking about the story I told you 12 years ago tonight, about my Kansas grandparents and the things they taught me when I was growing up. See, my grandparents, they came from the heartland. Their ancestors began settling there about 200 years ago. I don’t know if they have their birth certificates — but they were there. They were Scotch-Irish mostly — farmers, teachers, ranch hands, pharmacists, oil rig workers. Hardy, small town folks. Some were Democrats, but a lot of them — maybe even most of them — were Republicans. Party of Lincoln.
And my grandparents explained that folks in these parts, they didn’t like show-offs. They didn’t admire braggarts or bullies. They didn’t respect mean-spiritedness, or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead, what they valued were traits like honesty and hard work, kindness, courtesy, humility, responsibility, helping each other out. That’s what they believed in. True things. Things that last. The things we try to teach our kids.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, DNC Address (July 2016)

Life , People , Way , Idea

“[The Albanians] seem to be rather backward and primitive people… they can be as faithful as a dog; that is one of the traits of the primitive. Our Chuvash were the same. The Russian tsars always used them for their bodyguards.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Said to Edvard Kardelj (1947), as quoted in Vladimir Dedijer (1954), Tito Speaks, page 312
Contemporary witnesses

People , Faith , Dogs

“Socialism is, essentially, the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society. It is the solution natural to the industrial workers who see no reason why production should not be regulated directly and why markets should be more than a useful but subordinate trait in a free society. From the point of view of the community as a whole, socialism is merely the continuation of that endeavor to make society a distinctively human relationship of persons which in Western Europe was always associated with Christian traditions.”

Karl Polanyi book The Great Transformation

The Great Transformation (1944), Ch. 19 : Popular Government and Market Economy

Communication , Nature , Personality

“I have an idea. … If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know—Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Idea , Evil , Personality

“Why is honesty so vital? Because where honesty and integrity are present, other virtues follow. … Men and women of integrity understand intrinsically that theirs is the precious right to hold their heads in the sunlight of truth, unashamed before anyone. Embodied within this simple principle and character trait rests the foundational virtue of every person and of every society.”

Gordon B. Hinckley book Standing for Something

Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes.

Women , Men , Truth , Understanding

“The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and lacks any one of those three traits.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: I want to speak to you first of all as regards your duties as boys; and in the next place as regards your duties as men; and the two things hang together. The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and lacks any one of those three traits.

Boy , Sense

“I came and went in the midst of the naked truth. I am not a man of peculiar and exceptional traits. I recognise myself in everybody. I have the same desires, the same longings as the ordinary human being.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: Turn where you will, everywhere, the man and the woman ever confronting each other, the man who loves a hundred times, the woman who has the power to love so much and to forget so much. I went on my way again. I came and went in the midst of the naked truth. I am not a man of peculiar and exceptional traits. I recognise myself in everybody. I have the same desires, the same longings as the ordinary human being. Like everybody else I am a copy of the truth spelled out in the Room, which is, "I am alone and I want what I have not and what I shall never have." It is by this need that people live, and by this need that people die.

Truth

“The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Freud and the Future (1937)
Context: The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artistic temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers, which otherwise occurs much later in life; for while in the life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive stage, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one.

Life

“The most significant attribute and personality trait someone can possess is constant renewal; the continual process of renewing our wisdom in our personal life and in the workplace."

The above quote is an excerpt from the speech I gave the Broward County, City and County Managers Association in 1994. The theme of the presentation was how to identify higher-quality applicants and employees currently working in the organization. The concept is simple; some constantly learn what’s new and keep up to date on innovations and technology, while most only learn and are diffused by the renewal group.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

2000

Personality , Learning , Life , Wisdom

“Those in the dawn of life require nurturing from others; their personality traits and behaviors are formed during this period and they learn more from example and observation than words; reveal, kindness, truth, respect, and empathy for others.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1978

Life , Personality , Learning , Truth

“This is a painful bit of truth: Fascism, in the form of irresponsibility, is present in the masses of all countries, nations and races. Fascism is the result of thousands of years of warping of the human structure. It could have developed in any nation. It is not a specific German or Italian character trait. It works in every mortal.”

Wilhelm Reich book The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Section 2 : The Biological Miscalculation in the Human Struggle for Freedom
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Ch. 10 : Work Democracy

Truth , Pain , Country

“As an administrator, once an applicant met the minimum requirements, such as, education and experience; the attributes I sought the most included determination, persistence, and the unwavering pursuit to succeed. However, those personality traits were difficult to assess without a complex selection process.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1988

Education , Personality

“On one’s path through life, it shall be nearly impossible to find and acquire complete virtue. Aristotle listed his twelve virtues and other philosophers have noted even more personality traits to describe the virtuous. But one, morality jumps off the page which within itself is defined distinctively different between various religious, social value systems and nationalities. Morality is defined by our conscience, not the dictionary.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1996

Personality , Life

“By developing own worldview and personality traits, a person deeper understands splendor and value of the life. This gives him even more motivation and willpower to achieve sensibly targeted goals.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

Personality , Motivation , Understanding , Life

“Deficient self-confidence and self respect, develops low self esteem, and induces the need to find faults in others; wisdom and quality self-confidence, engenders one’s ability to find excellence in the traits of others.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1983

Confidence , Self-confidence , Wisdom

“First of all, I'm not narcissistic." When she opened her lips to argue, he said, "I know Narkissos of Thespiae -- while we might share traits, I came first, so he's Lothairistic, not the other way around.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: First of all, I'm not narcissistic."..."I know Narkissos of Thespiae--while we might share traits, I came first, so he's Lothairistic, not the other way around"-- Lothaire

Way

“Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.”

Stephen King book Cell

Source: Cell

Way , Intelligence

“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter XXIV: Conclusion
Context: Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: — "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"

World

“You don't have to agree with me, but I think the heart of who we are stays pretty much the same," Hope said, "What changes is how those core traits manifest themselves over time.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Fourth Comings

Hope , Thinking , Change , Time

“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Children , Truth , Soul , Birth

“a person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”

Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) American psychologist

Source: On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

Change , Personality

“I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.”

Philip Plait (1964) astronomer, skeptic

"The mainstreaming of crazy" (8 September 2009) http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/09/08/the-mainstreaming-of-evil/
Bad Astronomy blog

“You’re going to have to learn to ride a horse on your own, Phaedra', he said. 'It will make the journey faster.'

'The mule and I have an agreement.'

'The mule and you have similar traits.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Quintana of Charyn

Learning , Horse

“The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another.”

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Variant: .. the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.
Source: Odd Thomas

“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Courageous , Life , Courage

“Listen to me: I never married because I was too easily bored. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It's much better to be too easily interested.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“Confidence is a fine trait. Over-confidence isn't.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Obsidian Butterfly

Source: Obsidian Butterfly

Confidence

“When you see a small change in your life it means its a huge change in personality and your trait”

Natasha Friend (1972) American writer

Source: Lush

Life , Change , Personality

“This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)

People

“People were just too complex to reduce to simple personality traits.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Final Empire

People , Personality

“Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“I didn't bother to explain about the glitter in my hair. I figured they could think it was a family trait. We all glittered, just like the Cullens in Twilight.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: My Double Life

Family , Thinking

“Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human.”

Albert Ellis (1913–2007) American psychologist

Love , Personality

“It is a very natural human trait to destroy that which frightens us.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Guilty Pleasures

Source: Guilty Pleasures

Nature

“He was uncomplicated and upbeat and easy. At one point, I might have thought these traits made him a simpleton, but now I think they just translate to happiness.”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Source: Baby Proof

Thinking , Happiness

“Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait.”

Gavin de Becker (1954) American engineer

Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Decision

“Traits don't change, states of mind do.”

Elizabeth Strout book Olive Kitteridge

Source: Olive Kitteridge

Change

“By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Love , Perfection

“Here's what I think: the five most
unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and
jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Source: Hey Nostradamus!

People , Jealousy , Thinking , Change

“Have you heard that modesty is an attractive traits?
Only to ugly people”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

People

“Almost every sinful action ever committed can be traced back to a selfish motive. It is a trait we hate in other people but justify in ourselves.”

Stephen Kendrick book The Love Dare

Source: The Love Dare

Hate , People , Motivation , Selfishness

“Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934) Hungarian American psychologist

Source: Flow: The Psychology of Happiness

Life , Learning

“You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) American science fiction writer

Thinking

“Magnus had a list of favored traits in a partner-black hair, blue eyes, honest…”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: What Really Happened in Peru

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Personality

““You can hardly blame them.”
“Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait, then no, I can’t.””

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 3 (p. 67).

Stupidity

“Always needing to have the last word is a bad trait Ms. Blake, pisses people off.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Titus to Anita
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, The Lunatic Cafe (1996)

People

“This conscious self is only one aspect of our greater reality, however; the part that springs into earthknowing. It can be called the "focus personality," because through it we perceive our three-dimensional life. It contains within it, however, traces of the unknown or "source self" out of which it constantly emerges. The source self is the fountainhead of our present physical being, but it exists outside of that frame of reference. We are earth versions of ourselves, beautifully turned into corporal experience. Our known consciousness is filtered through perceptive mechanisms that are a part of what they perceive. We are the instruments through which we know the earth. In other terms, we are particles of energy, flowing from the source self into physical materialization. Each source self forms many such particles or "Aspect selves" that impinge upon three-dimensional reality, striking our space-time continuum. Others are not physical at all, but have their existence in completely different systems of reality. Each Aspect self is connected to the other, however, through the common experience of the source self, and can come to some degree to draw on the knowledge, abilities, and perceptions of the other Aspects. Psychologically, these other Aspects appear within the known self as personality traits, characteristics, and talents that are uniquely ours. The individual is the particle or focus personality, formed by the intersection of the unknown self with space and time. We can follow any of our traits or emotions back to this source self, or at least to a recognition of its existence.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), pp.118-119

Life , Spring , Knowledge , Reality

“There is a quality of the educated mind which may best be described as a kind of sincerity, and conversely the outstanding trait of ignorance is that of clever insincerity.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 43

Education , Sincerity

“Portugal was born in the shadow of the Catholic Church and religion, from the beginning it was the formative element of the soul of the nation and the dominant trait of character of the Portuguese people.”

António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) Prime Minister of Portugal

Salazar: speeches, notes, reports, theses, articles and interviews, 1909-1955: Anthology - Page 212; of António de Oliveira Salazar - Published by Editorial Vanguarda, 1955 - 361 pages

People , Religion , Soul

“The Conservative Party in the House of Commons has played ball with Paisley for 18 months, during which he has sat among them on the government benches but voted against them…For was he not the secret weapon of those who wanted to send Ulster the way of white Rhodesia? … That is why the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Humphrey Atkins, and the Northern Ireland Office spent the first year-and-a-half of this Parliament building up Ian Paisley and whispering to him and to everybody else that he was going to be the big white chief under a new set-up which they planned to introduce. They recognized in him a man with no dedication to the Union, a man who would abuse the Parliament of the Union to its face and declared that he owed it no allegiance…He is afraid for his own skin, and afraid of the fringe men of violence on whose backs he would fain ride, provided he can distance himself from them when serious trouble looms. The old adage holds good; all bullies are cowards, and most cowards are bullies. That is the last trait which completed the portrait of the man who the enemies of the Union are hoping against hope will put them in business again.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Speech in Belfast (8 May 1981), reported in The Times (9 May 1981), p. 2

Men , Secret , Hope , Way

“An important consequence of the unique interaction between internal and external forces … is that knowledge of genetic differences contains no information at all about whether a characteristic can be changed by environmental and social arrangements. The most elementary error about genetics and development is to suppose that “genetic” is the opposite of “changeable” and that an answer to the question “how much can a trait be changed by social, historical, and individual circumstances” is given by an answer to the question “how important are genes.””

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Genes and Sexuality: An Exchange (1995)

Error , Question , Knowledge , Change

“The playing of Soviet pianists of the younger generation differed significantly from the composer’s performing style, as discussed above. (Here I am referring to the generation of Richter and Gilels or younger, as opposed to Prokofiev’s coevals such as Neuhaus and Samuil Feinberg, who also had Prokofiev’s works in their repertoires.) Since we know that Prokofiev appreciated their playing, does it mean that he accepted their approach? Should we regard the new generation’s playing as a distortion of the composer’s intentions or as a natural evolution of interpretive style?
I believe that Prokofiev, having been exposed to the new performing style of the Soviet pianists, accepted at least some of its qualities. We can mention assertive muscular playing, open expressivity, and a gripping commitment to the music among those traits that brought recognition to Soviet pianists and assured their success in the international arena. These characteristics were concordant with the evolving compositional style of Prokofiev, whose later works became both more virile (often heroic) and expressive in a warmer and more open way.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev the pianist

Music , Way , Nature , Success

“I'm known for speaking my mind, a trait I probably inherited from my parents, Louis and Mary Leakey—neither of whom was renowned for tact.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (2001) with Virginia Morell

Parent

“In regard to matter after critical matter – the Aryan-Dravidian divide, the nature of Islamic invasions, the nature of Islamic rule, the character of the freedom struggle – we find this trait – suppresso veri, suggesto falsi. This is the real scandal of history writing in the last thirty years. And it has been possible for these ‘eminent historians’ to perpetrate it because they acquired control of institutions like the ICHR. To undo the falsehood, the control has to be undone.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

History , Nature , Freedom

“It (the fetus) is strongly aware of your feelings toward it. At times the personality traits that it had earlier color this perception. It pushes these aside impatiently. It has mental images of its own probable future, and parts of it do become frightened at times, to relinquish old adult powers for an infant's helplessness.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 499, Page 380
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 9

Color , Feeling , Time , Future

“Armon Jarles, there is only the cosmos and the electronic entities that constitute it, without soul or purpose, save so far as neuronic minds impose purpose upon it.
“Armon Jarles, the Hierarchy embodies the highest form of such purpose.
“Armon Jarles, the supernatural and the idealized have one trait in common. They are not. There is only reality.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 10 (p. 105)

Soul , Reality

“[T]he psychic and physical characteristics of human beings, and the differences between individuals, are the consequence of an interaction between the genes that are present in the fertilized egg and the sequence of environmental circumstances that the developing organism experiences during its entire life history. With a few exceptions, like cystic fibrosis where possession of the defective genotype leads ineluctably to the disease, or language acquisition where the language spoken depends only on experience and not at all on genotype, human characteristics are all subject to this interaction of forces. There are, moreover, random events in cell growth and differentiation that are neither genetic nor environmental in the usual sense, and which play an extremely important part in development, especially in behavioral traits.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Genes and Sexuality: An Exchange (1995)

Life , Disease , Behavior , History

“[W]e do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn't seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends into further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past […]. I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemma.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Shoemaker and Morning Star", pp. 206–207
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Age , Color , Time , Past

“Pick out any trait you want in your child… By surrounding this child with sunshine from the sky and your own heart, by giving the closest communion with nature, by feeding this child well-balanced, nutritious food, by giving it all that is implied in healthful environmental influences, and by doing all in love, you can thus cultivate in the child and fix there for all its life all of these traits.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Love , Life , Health , Food

“I think it's hard to make the case, which implicitly the left makes, that somehow the world would have been better off if the Europeans had stayed home. It certainly doesn't work for north America, that's for sure. I mean, I'm sure the Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don't know what they were because they didn't write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don't think we'd have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we've had in north America.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

"Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is'" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization, The Guardian, February 20, 2011.

World , Home , Hell , Thinking

“While the Christian apostles preached their ideal in the open, the Talmud hides; and its two appendages, the Kahal and Freemasonry, are even more invisible. The three of them use, in order to remain in the dark, a scabrous and accursed means, namely the lie. In other words, the lie is the basis of the system used by Jews, to whom one can say.. 'You speak, therefore you be.' But the lie has a mortal enemy, namely the truth. For truth is the distinctive trait of Christianity.”

Nicolae Paulescu (1869–1931) Romanian academic

From Fiziologia Filozofică: Spitalul, Coranul, Talmudul, Cahalul, Franc-Masoneria ("Philosophic Physiology: The Hospital, the Koran, the Talmud, the Kahal and Freemasonry"), vol. II., Bucharest, 1913.

Truth , Lie

“Those who expect from a people like the Hindus a species of composition of precisely the same character as the historical works of Greece and Rome commit the very gregarious error of overlooking the peculiarities which distinguish the natives of India from all other races, and which strongly discriminate their intellectual productions of every kind from those of the West. Their philosophy, their poetry, their architecture, are marked with traits of originality; and the same may be expected to pervade their history, which, like the arts enumerated, took a character from its intimate association with the religion of the people. It must be recollected, moreover,… that the chronicles of all the polished nations of Europe, were, at a much more recent date, as crude, as wild, and as barren, as those of the early Rajputs.” … “My own animadversions upon the defective condition of the annals of Rajwarra have more than once been checked by a very just remark: ‘When our princes were in exile, driven from hold to hold, and compelled to dwell in the clefts of the mountains, often doubtful whether they would not be forced to abandon the very meal preparing for them, was that a time to think of historical records?’ ”… “If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmood’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts, architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the character of their princes and the acts of their reigns?”

James Tod (1782–1835) 1782-1835, English officer of the British East India Company and an Oriental scholar

[The fact appears to be that] “After eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus; after every capital city had been repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarous, bigoted, and exasperated foes; it is too much to expect that the literature of the country should not have sustained, in common with other interests, irretrievable losses.”
James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London,l829,1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

People , Age , Religion , Art

“Love has a particular trait: it has a task or purpose to fulfill - to abide. By its nature, love is enduring. The Holy Spirit offers our world love that dispels uncertainty; love that overcomes the fear of betrayal; love that carries eternity within; the true love that draws us into a unity that abides!”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Youth Day Vigil (19 July 2008)

Love , World , Fear , Nature

“Racial prejudice is thus a generalized set of stereotypes of a high degree of consistency which includes emotional responses to race names, a belief in typical characteristics associated with race names, and an evaluation of such traits.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Daniel Katz and K.W. Braly (1935) "Racial prejudice and racial stereotypes". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. p. 191-2 Cited in: Mark P. Zanna, James M. Olson (1994) The Psychology of Prejudice. p. 16

“My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal.”

Michael Shermer book The Science of Good and Evil

[Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Share, Gossip, and Follow the Golden Rule, 1st edition, 2004, Times Books, New York, ISBN 0805075208, 18]

Sense , Universe

“…the American people seemed to have no clearer idea than they. Indeed, the American people had no idea at all; they were wandering in a wilderness much more sandy than the Hebrews had ever trodden about Sinai; they had neither serpents nor golden calves to worship. They had lost the sense of worship; for the idea that they worshipped money seemed a delusion. Worship of money was an old-world trait; a healthy appetite akin to worship of the Gods, or to worship of power in any concrete shape; but the American wasted money more recklessly than any one ever did before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not what to do with his money when he got it”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Money , God , People , World

“Abuse of any one generally shows that he has marked traits of character. The stupid and indifferent are passed by in silence.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 2

Stupidity , Silence , Indifference

“Right now, at my institute in the US we are working on gene-caused failures in brain development that frequently lead to autism and schizophrenia. We may also find that differences in these respective brain development genes also lead to differences in our abilities to carry out different mental tasks.
In some cases, how these genes function may help us to understand variations in IQ, or why some people excel at poetry but are terrible at mathematics. All too often people with high mathematical abilities have autistic traits. The same gene that gives some people such great mathematical abilities may also lead to autistic behaviour. This is why, in studying autism and schizophrenia, we believe that we shall come very close to a better understanding of intelligence and, therefore, of the differences in intelligence.”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

To question genetic intelligence is not racism (2007)

People , Intelligence , Mathematics , Failure

“Abu Hurayra reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "A believing man should not hate a believing woman. If he dislikes something in her character, he should be pleased with some other or another trait of hers."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 2, hadith number 275
Sunni Hadith

Hate , Peace

“A threshold competency is a person's generic knowledge, motive, trait, self image, social role, or skill which is essential to performing a job, but is not causally related to superior job performance.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 23.

Motivation , Knowledge , Personality

“If there is real love, it is not difficult to exercise tolerance, for tolerance is the daughter of love -- it is the truly Christian trait, which, of course, Christians of today do not practice.”

Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) German doctor, anthropologist, public health activist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician

Liebt man sich wirklich, so ist es ja nicht schwer, die Toleranz zu üben, denn die Toleranz ist die Tochter der Liebe -- es ist die eigentlich christliche Eigenschaft, die freilich von der heutigen Christenwelt nicht geübt wird.
in a letter to his father dated 7 April 1851, published in Briefe an seite Eltern, 1839 bis 1864 (1907).

Love , Exercises , Daughters

“We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained
in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic:
Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic,
None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

"The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

Birth

“He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 24

Dogs

“Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Evelyn Waugh: Club and Country", p. 95
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Education , Sadness , School , Game

“… this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi’ (‘I love you’) or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?’ (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame’ – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness’. The ‘honorary’ Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

citation needed
On Modernity

Love , World , Art , Home

“Doctors, chess grand masters and football quarterbacks share a trait: the ability to recognize patterns and learn from them. A doctor can connect symptoms to causes and use that to make a diagnosis and offer a prescription. Top quarterbacks and grand masters can sense the shape of unfolding play, and profit from that knowledge.
Great managers are also skilled at pattern recognition. Every industry is reshaped by patterns of strategic change that can dramatically shift profit and power.”

Adrian Slywotzky (1951) American economist

Source: Profit Patterns (1999), p. 2.

Knowledge , Sense , Learning , Change

“The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Source: The Principles of Ethics (1897), Part I: The Data of Ethics, Ch. 7, The Psychological View

Feeling

“The DC comics were always a lot more true blue. Very enjoyable, but they were big, brave uncles and aunties who probably insisted on a high standard of you know mental and physical hygiene. Whereas the Stan Lee stuff, the Marvel comics, he went from one dimensional characters whose only characteristic was they dressed up in costumes and did good. Whereas Stan Lee had this huge breakthrough of two-dimensional characters. So, they dress up in costumes and do good, but they've got a bad heart. Or a bad leg. I actually did think for a long while that having a bad leg was an actual character trait.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

Interview on BBC Radio 4 (27 January 2005) http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=4533

Thinking , Heart

“Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female and by claiming as his own all female characteristics - emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc. - and projecting onto women all male traits - vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female - public relations. He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 2 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes) so in original).

Life , Women , Men , Courage

“The only American woman deserving a place on U. S. paper currency is, of course, Anne Hutchinson, a devout 17th century Protestant New Englander who was a fearless champion of religious liberty, family, free speech, and equality — not preference — for women in religious affairs. Perhaps a new piece of currency could be created, one to which the attachment of her portrait would do honor. Ms. Hutchinson, however, is out of contention in the Democrats’ virulent anti-Southern currency crusade because her character traits – and the fifteen children she had with one husband — just do not jive with being Modern Democratic Party Women, those who glory in, and seek legal, economic, and political preference for their talents in whining, vamping, aborting, as well as recognition for their indispensable and eagerly given help in making the United States one of the world’s industrial-scale producers of both pornography and the dismembered corpses of infants. There may be something that can be done, however. The portrait of another Democratic icon named Woodrow Wilson now adorns the $100,000 bill, which appears to be to be used mainly in transactions.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention http://non-intervention.com/1689/democrats-scourge-the-south-after-the-battle-flag-it%e2%80%99s-on-to-old-hickory/ (9 July 2015), by M. Scheuer.
2010s

Women , Children , World , Family

“The claim that women have a stronger average parental urge than men is sometimes viewed as a sexist generalization. But it’s only sexist if we take a dim view of the trait in question: the parental urge. One could turn the accusation on its head: Those who view the evolutionist’s claim (that women are more parental than men) as sexist are actually being sexist themselves, because they’re taking a negative view of a trait that’s usually found more strongly in females than males. They are therefore prizing prototypically masculine traits more highly than prototypically feminine ones.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 230

Women , Men , Question , Parent

“I suppose men are born with traits that can be cultivated in the direction of leadership. But there is also no doubt that leadership can be cultivated The idea of any man being born an army commander or being born to be a theater commander, such as General Eisenhower, just isn’t so. The characteristics of leadership, necessarily has to have certain decisiveness and confidence come from knowledge based on studies and training. The fundamental thing is your basic knowledge, the development of your mind, and your ability to apply this knowledge as you go along your military career.”

Lucian Truscott (1895–1965) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Quoted in Nineteen Stars: A Study in Military Character & Leadership, (CA: Presidio, 1971), by Edgar F. Puryear, Jr.— in answer to the question of whether leaders are born or made posed by author

Men , Confidence , Idea , Knowledge

“An atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period; it was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Rykov and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle; the number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler. That far. Trotsky had similar links, without doubt. Hitler was an adventurist, as was Trotsky, they had traits in common. And the rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, had links with them. And, of course, many of the military leaders.”

Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986) Soviet politician and diplomat

Quote from Ludo Martens's Another view of Stalin, pp. 177. Original quote from the Russian version of F. Chueva Sto sorok besed s MOLOTOVYM (Moscow: Terra, 1991), p. 413 (The quote does not appear in the French translation: Félix Tchouev, Conversations avec Molotov (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).) The quote can also be found here http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/molotov.html

Thinking

“Curiosity and openness to new ways of thinking ensures future success more than any other quality. Learn, read, question, think. In developing the ability to exercise those traits, you will not only be successful in business, but in the business of life.”

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (1929–2013) Canadian-American businessman

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/10/17/liberal-arts-are-best-preparation-even-business-career-essay

Life , Way , Exercises , Question

“Libertarians used to tell us that ‘the love of freedom is the strongest of political motives,’ but recent events have taught us the extravagance of this opinion. The ‘herd-instinct’ and the yearning for paternal authority are often as strong. Indeed the tendency of men to gang up under a leader and submit to his will is of all political traits the best attested by history. It has been so shockingly exemplified in modem times that only a somnambulist could ignore it in trying to build, or defend, a free society. His first concern should be to make sure that no one gang or group-neither the proletariat, nor the capitalists, nor the landowners, no the bankers, nor the army, nor the church, nor the government itself-shall have exclusive power.”

Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), pp. 37-38

Love , Men , History , Motivation