“When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em.”

There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.

She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.

There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ’em all away from you. That’s never possible.

I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system – that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality.

It’s better to be silent than to be a fool.

A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.

People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.

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. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.

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.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

But sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down.

Writing is something you’ll never learn in any university or at any school. It’s something that is within you, and if it isn’t there, nothing can put it there.

There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

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.

I do my best to love everybody.

His stellar record suggests that the only right answer to the age-old question of whether it is better to be lucky or good may be: both.

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.

If you try to give an on-the-one-hand-or-the-other- hand answer, only one of the hands tends to get quoted.

Diversification is the only answer.

If the answer is yes, then there’s no immediate danger, no need to overreact.

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn’t use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.

Was Ty Cobb psychotic throughout his baseball career? The answer is yes.