Character Assessment Quotes

It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

A second-class intellect—but a first-class temperament!

You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them.

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends

You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.

Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.

I do the best I know how, the very best I can, And I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, What is said against me won't count; If it brings me out wrong, Ten angels swearing that I was right Would have made no difference.

Remember, we can judge better by the conduct of people towards others than by their manner towards ourselves.

When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.

Women have a very good sense for seeing instantly what constitutes a good man. Not physically. The physical strength is only a small side of it.

[President John F.] Kennedy must be a strange character—obstinate, sensitive, ruthless and highly sexed.

The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.

You are what your record says you are.

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

In looking for people to hire, look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you.

Our naturalization laws should be so amended as to make the inquiry into the character and good disposition of persons applying for citizenship more careful and searching … We accept the man as a citizen without any knowledge of his fitness, and he assumes the duties of citizenship without any knowledge as to what they are. The privileges of American citizenship are so great and its duties so grave that we may well insist upon a good knowledge of every person applying for citizenship and a good knowledge by him of our institutions. We should not cease to be hospitable to immigration, but we should cease to be careless as to the character of it. There are men of all races, even the best, whose coming is necessarily a burden upon our public revenues or a threat to social order. These should be identified and excluded.

A man who examines the saddle and bridle and not the animal itself when he is out to buy a horse is a fool; similarly, only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his position, which after all is only something we wear like clothing.

You've got to judge people, ultimately, by their actions rather than their words.

It's really hard to judge people until you see what they do with the job.

We have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first).

I like Thomas Jefferson, though he intimidated me. I thought he would have been very tough to be around. I don't know if he had such a sense of humor.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

History will decide if I'm a villain or a hero.

If you do something bad, it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means you had bad judgment.