"There's an ethic that says: 'You don't run off to the church for the sacraments of salvation, you establish a personal relationship with God. You don't run off to the courts for justice, you settle it yourself. You don't run off to labor unions to sort out your work relations, you can take this job and shove it if you don't like what you're doing.'"

Character

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Thematic Reflection

This quotation examines the core nature of Character as articulated by John Shelton Reed. Within historical and literary traditions, reflections on Character provide actionable mental models, challenging individuals to evaluate personal ethics, self-discipline, and daily actions.

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About John Shelton Reed

John Shelton Reed is an American sociologist and essayist, author or editor of 23 books, most of them dealing with the contemporary American South. Reed has also written for a variety of non-academic publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Oxford American. He was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement, in 2000, as William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology and director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. He helped to found the Center for the Study of the American South and was a founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures.

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More by John Shelton Reed

"I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him."

— John Shelton Reed
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"Maybe we've been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It's something that's open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here."

— John Shelton Reed
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"I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me."

— John Shelton Reed
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"Southerners smile more than other Americans."

— John Shelton Reed
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More about Character

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today."

— Martin Luther King
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"I think all actors are supposed to be character actors."

— Dennis Farina
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"Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation."

— Salvador Dali
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"The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history."

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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