Quotes About Courage

Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.

Reform is slow work, and it is for neither the fainthearted nor the impatient.

Douglass understood history and the men who made it. Perfection was impossible; greatness was reserved for those who managed to move forward in an imperfect world:

Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage.

It's tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced—and too often paid—the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed, or color.

solemn faithfulness, courage that cannot be daunted, hopefulness that cannot be dashed

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!…I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us….If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." The

Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.

was to shape them in her image: courageous, competitive, caring, and tireless.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.1 —THOMAS JEFFERSON, July 5, 1775

Under Small's influence Jefferson came to share Immanuel Kant's 1784 definition of the spirit of the era: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity," Kant wrote.21 "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

that we shall go forward instead of halting and falling back, because I have an abiding faith in the generosity, the courage, the resolution, and the common sense of all my countrymen.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity," Kant wrote.21 "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything," Aristotle wrote.

under all conditions. There is little

Those who are frightened of losing what they have are the most vulnerable, and it is difficult to be clear-headed when you believe that you are teetering on a precipice.

Men will thank God on their knees, a hundred years from now, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, in a position to give leadership to the thought of the American people and direction to the activities of their government, in that dark hour when a powerful and ruthless barbarism threatened to overrun the civilization of the Western World.

One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, who worked as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger in Jim Crow–era Alabama.

Surely, in the light of history," Mrs. Roosevelt remarked, "it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.

Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.

while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage.

As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed," he said, "the whole thing crumbles.

The reason I don't worry about society is, nineteen people knocked down two buildings and killed thousands. Hundreds of people ran into those buildings to save them. I'll take those odds every f*cking day.

You know what they say: If at first you don't succeed, f**k it.