Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
If you have a choice between qualifications and personal qualities when it comes to hiring people, go with personal qualities. You can teach them the job.
Vanity is a desire of personal glory, the wish to be appreciated, honoured, and run after, not because of one's personal qualities, merits, and achievements, but because of one's individual existence. At best, therefore, it is a frivolous beauty whim it befits.
[W]hat I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system. . . a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.
All our distinctions ire accidental; beauty and deformity, though personal qualities, are neither entitled to praise nor censure; yet it so happens that they color our opinion of those qualities to which mankind have attached responsibility.
The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.
Nothing endures but personal qualities.
Inner resilience and the ability to bounce back are personal qualities. . . . Align yourself with someone who has this kind of resilience so that your own can be strengthened. Find another oak to weather the storm with you. Anyone who is in touch with his or her core self will always respond.
The hope of any nation lies in the personal qualities of its individual members.
The true measure of a man is how he behaves when death is close.
