“We’re paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It’s that simple.”

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.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

So many guys are so conservative with their hair, and I always joke with all my buddies when they mess with me, and I’ll say, ‘That’s right, keep the same haircut for ten years.’ How fun is that?

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.

Women have hunger two-fold, shyness four-fold, daring six-fold, and lust eight-fold as compared to men.

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.