Character
One historian sums up Longworth: "Debonair and aristocratic, given to wearing spats and carrying a gold-headed cane, he was anything but a typical politician. He was perpetually cheerful, quick with a joke or witty retort, and unfailingly friendly. He seemed never to have a care and made hard decisions with such ease and detachment that some people wondered if anything at all really mattered to him."
One particular famous retort is told about Longworth. One day, while lounging in a chair at the Capitol, another member of the House ran his hand over Longworth's bald pate and commented, "Nice and smooth. Feels just like my wife's bottom." Longworth felt his own head and returned an answer: "Yes, so it does."
Read more about this topic: Nicholas Longworth
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)
“Sadism and masochism, in Freud’s final formulation, are fusions of Eros and the destructive instincts. Sadism represents a fusion of the erotic instincts and the destructive instincts directed outwards, in which the destructiveness has the character of aggressiveness. Masochism represents the fusion of the erotic instincts and the destructive instincts turned against oneself, the aim of the latter being self-destruction.”
—Patrick Mullahy (b. 1912)
“But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough
And pressed at midnighht in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)