Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

The struggle for your own character is the struggle for the nation's character.

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.

I discourage a cult of personality.

I cannot see that everything the white man does is to be copied.

The one lesson I've learned from technology and food is the only time you know you're doing the wrong thing is when you're doing what everyone else is doing.

Nobody's unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody's an individual anymore.

Nationality is the aggregated individuality of the greatest men of the nation.

As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!

But the English are different, and they don't know how to be other than different.

Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one's character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person... if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away.

A nation's institutions and beliefs are determined by it's character.

Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle ofyour character and aims.

In general, American life is more easy-going. And civic pride, national pride in a cultural sense, is great in America. I think what they esteem in America is character and energy, and being different and superior to other peoples. Of course, every nation feels itself to be superior, but in America it's a jaunty feeling, and in some cases a rather ominous one among the super-patriots.

Americans continue to rapidly homogenize ourselves into a neutered oblivion. For a country founded on the protection of the unique, we relish our sameness.

I don't really like discussions about a supposed Russian national character.

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

A nation's character is the sum of its splendid deeds; they constitute one common patrimony, the nation's inheritance. They awe foreign powers, they arouse and animate our own people.

In the last analysis, our national future depends upon our national character that is, whether it is spiritually or materially minded.

If you're doing what everyone else is doing, you're doing it wrong.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.

Never follow a follower who is following someone who has fallen. Its why the whole world is falling apart.

Never imitate. The mind is an imitator, because imitation is very easy. To be someone is very difficult. To become someone is very easy - all that you need is to be a hypocrite, which is not much of a problem. Deep down you remain the same, but on the surface you go on painting yourself according to some image.

If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.

A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character.