Skip to content

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

— Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Another quote →

Topics

Courage

More quotes by Harper Lee

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

All Harper Lee quotes →

You may also like

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar (1599)

All doubt is cowardice — all trust is brave.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Courage is never born with a person; time and circumstances inject it into a person and bring it forth from within.

Sanu Sharma

Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.

Bertrand Russell Education and the Social Order (1932)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Harper Lee (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.