Character is an essential tendency. It can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can't be ultimately changed. It's the structure of our bones, the blood that runs through our veins. If we want our children to possess the traits of character we most admire, we need to teach them what those traits are and why they deserve both admiration and allegiance. Children must learn to identify the forms and content of those traits.
Character is that which can do without success.
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. Coalition, a project of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a nonpartisan, nonsectarian organization.