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.
HARPER LEEThe 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.
More Harper Lee Quotes
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Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.
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But sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down.
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As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, ‘I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.
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Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?
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I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.
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You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.
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Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
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Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write.
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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.
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Things are never as bad as they seem.
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You can’t really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.
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Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.
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Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.
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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.
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There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.
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I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.
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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.
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Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.
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People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.
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The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
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Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.
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With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.
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People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
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Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.
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Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.
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Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
HARPER LEE