Dan Coats on Character

"Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character."

A United States Republican senator, Dan Coats, said that apparently. Good point! 

But isn't this beautiful study of character similar to what they say about practicing good science? Science, similarly, has a testing ground that is often buried deep in the mundane. 

Experiment after dull experiment to verify limits and tolerances, case studies and clinical trials involving control groups and placebos. Then what happens?

Some fool leaves his lunch in the hermetically-sealed cold room with the bacterial strain everyone's been working on for five years, and it morphs into the cure for death. 

The idiot has enough character to tell nobody he accidentally left his egg sandwich in with the medicine yogurt!

He instead becomes a famous science speaker as the developer of the fungal-bungle elixir of anti-death, and he goes around the public speaking circuit spouting shit like that senator!