Character
Downer was described by Alfred Deakin as 'bull-headed, and rather thick-necked, … with the dogged set of the mouth of a prize fighter' and 'smallish eyes'. Downer was regarded a first-rate barrister, and some of his speeches to juries could hardly have been excelled as examples of forensic art. He was equally successful as a parliamentary speaker, one of his colleagues said of him that in his earlier days he was the best debater in a house that contained Charles Kingston, Frederick Holder, Cockburn, and John Jenkins. In politics he tended to be conservative, he once described himself as a Tory, and possibly on account of this often found himself in a minority during his later years in parliament. He was nevertheless constructive and always advocated the rights of married women to their own property, women's suffrage, protection of local industries, and federation.
Read more about this topic: John Downer
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to one another. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“For character too is a process and an unfolding ... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)