Character
Because of his incredibly powerful voice, which matched his 5'11" 200-pound frame, Diamond was once dubbed "The Honker." Many of his comrades at Guadalcanal considered him "a human air-raid warning system."
Even while on active duty, Diamond lived informally, often going hatless and wearing dungarees in open defiance of military dress regulations. (He even accepted one of his decorations in dungarees.) Self-confidence, even cockiness, was one of his outstanding characteristics. He considered anybody with less than ten years in the Corps a "boot". While he bawled out recruits who sometimes instinctively saluted him, he frequently failed, himself, to salute less than a field grade officer.
Diamond rejected opportunities to apply for a commission — that is, become an officer — saying "nobody can make a gentleman out of me."
Read more about this topic: Lou Diamond
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1966)
“Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I prize the purity of his character as highly as I do that of hers. As a moral being, whatever it is morally wrong for her to do, it is morally wrong for him to do. The fallacious doctrine of male and female virtues has well nigh ruined all that is morally great and lovely in his character: he has been quite as deep a sufferer by it as woman, though mostly in different respects and by other processes.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)