Characteristically Quotes

#1. Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post Gothic mode.

Brian Aldiss

#2. The American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy.

Lewis H. Lapham

#3. Humanists are not characteristically strong in faith, hope and love.

Arthur E. Morgan

#4. We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both "what" we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.

Judith Butler

#5. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures.

Charles C. Mann

#6. Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual.

Mark A. Noll

#7. The American people are not uniquely, but characteristically the most spontaneously generous in the world and you're seeing that all over this country in Web sites of charitable organizations that are crashing because of the overwhelming desire on the part of ordinary people to help out.

Richard Norton Smith

#8. Social democrats are characteristically modest - a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologise a little less for our shortcomings and speak more assertively of achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us.

Tony Judt

#9. Impression of having seen me before. It was not till afterwards that I thought this rather characteristically dull of him. I drew him far away - I

Henry James

#10. Reactive applications are characteristically interactive, fault tolerant, scalable, and event driven.

Jamie Allen

#11. Planes and Trains and Boats and Busses Characteristically Evolve a common attitude of blue Unless you have a suitcase and a ticket and a passport And the cargo that they're carrying is you.

Tom Waits

#12. We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#13. Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

Wendell Berry

#14. Sometimes when you are asked a question that is difficult, the mind doesn't stay silent if it doesn't have the answer. The mind produces something, and what it produces very characteristically is the answer to an easier but related question.

Daniel Kahneman

#15. To call a man a characteristically Oxford man is, in my opinion, to give him the highest compliment that could be paid to any human being.

William E. Gladstone

#16. The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..

Paul Theroux

#17. For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future.

Alison Gopnik

#18. A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.

Sigmund Freud

#19. He was as absurd as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices, and favoured democracy. Being thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.

Jonathan Grimwood

#20. Faced with the alternative of saying goodbye to the gold standard, and therefore to his own employment, and goodbye to other people's employment, Mr. Churchill characteristically selected the latter course.

Oswald Mosley

#21. I'm not quite sure when I began to be troubled by the creeping sense of my own ludicrousness, but it persisted - and eventually grew into a fascination. I started writing about it. Thus, in His characteristically mysterious way, the Lord made clear His plans for me.

Glen Duncan

#22. They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

Michael Lewis

#23. Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

#24. Several travelers noted that American masters wanted above all to be "popular" with their slaves - a characteristically American need that was probably rare in Brazil or the Caribbean.

David Brion Davis

#25. Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility ... youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.

C.S. Lewis

#26. What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

Tony Judt

#27. When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, he observed, characteristically, "It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get.

Gore Vidal

#28. My father, an entrepreneur but hardly a technologist, was looking to buy a computer to 'automate' our family business. In 1981, he characteristically dove head first into computing and bought an Osborne I.

Steven Sinofsky

#29. Morris Berman has pointed out that museums characteristically present hard things, such as axes and spears, as evidence of early culture. But culture very likely begins with baskets made of reeds that are "soft" and hold emptiness.

Robert Bly

#30. The problem is to appreciate differences in the basic premises of thought and in the very methods of thinking, and these are so often overlooked that our interpretations of Chinese philosophy are apt to be a projection of characteristically Western ideas into Chinese terminology.

Alan W. Watts