Quotes About Courage

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

It's easier to accept lies by invoking a misguided alibi of tolerance and mutual respect than to live outside the cone of public approval. This is clear in every recent national debate over abortion, marriage, family, sexuality, and rights in general. Many of us are happy to live with half-truths and ambiguity rather than risk being cut out of the herd. The culture of lies thrives on our own complicity, lack of courage, and self-deception. The

St. Paul tells us that "God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control. Do not be ashamed then of testifying to our Lord

When we no longer have the courage to live by the truth ourselves, when we no longer really hunger for it, then we no longer insist on it from others. The result is a culture of evasive unreality, a nation of alibis. And we come to accept more dishonesty and less integrity in our politics as unavoidable rules of the road. The

Christians have many good reasons for hope. Optimism is another matter. Optimism assumes that, sooner or later, things will naturally turn out for the better. Hope has no such illusions. That

He was reminded dully of a scene in The Big Parade years ago (was everything in fiction or in film more real to him than fact?) in which the American troops were shown advancing across a wooded slope into battle: walking slowly doggedly on, their guns in their hands, their grim faces set: plodding straight ahead in a kind of frightful and relentless monotony, undeterred by bursting shrapnel, smoke, gas, tank-fire, or their own dead.… He did not push his way through the crowds.

He turned then to go on—and stopped dead in his tracks. Suddenly he had never felt so good and so foolish in his life. You God damned fool, he said to himself; if you've got enough curiosity and interest to know what's in that book, then what the hell are you running away from?

The Sorrow and the Pity,

In all parts of the Old World, as well as of the New, it was evident that Columbus had kindled a fire in every mariner's heart. That fire was the harbinger of a new era, for it was not to be extinguished.

Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.

It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.

I tell you, those Spaniards are rank cowards, as all bullies are. They pray to a woman, the idolatrous rascals! and no wonder they fight like women.

When all the world is young, lad,And all the trees are green;And every goose a swan, lad,And every lass a queen;Then hey for boot and horse, lad,And round the world away:Young blood must have its course, lad,And every dog his day.

It is only the great hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, Can never know what true friendship means.

And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon [totalitarianism]? Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies. Yes, it was the great leaders: FDR, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Thatcher, Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think—and you don't say it honestly and bluntly.

only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill the world today would be unrecognizable--dark, impoverished, tortured.

You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think—and you don't say it honestly and bluntly." —Charles Krauthammer

Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.

When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you're slamming the door in the face of God.

come on, you" (last words from flight 128)

From the recovery experience of hundreds of thousands of people, we know that there is an effective way out of this constricting and binding effect of shame: to tell the story of our suffering to safe and supportive others. (51)

No matter which concern, problem or life-issue we may want to work on, risking and beginning to talk about it with a safe person or persons is a way out of the unnecessary burden of remaining silent. And when we tell our story from our hearts, bones and guts, we discover the truth about ourselves. Doing so is healing