The future success of our nation depends on our ability to understand the difference between right and wrong and to have the strength of character to make the right choices.
You cannot have a good character today and at the same time have a small mind and a little heart. You cannot have a good character today and be merely a petty reformer.
It's really nice when you can sit down with somebody and just talk to them, and talk about your ideas and what you think the character is, and they respond to it. It's a really nice way to do it, but it doesn't happen very often.
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group Groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together [is] surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.
Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.
....for friendships that are acquired by a price and not by greatness and nobility of character are purchased but are not owned, and at the proper moment they cannot be spent.
Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.
The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon 's immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.
... Societies aren t made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole.