Atticus Finch

"Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us to try to win."

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."

"I'm simply defending the rights of the accused."

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through."

"I wanted to have a private life and a private place to cry."

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit them, but it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

"The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow."

"If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks."

"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Edison, and the ignorant man the equal of any president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court."

"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another."

"The people who have the most to give are the people who have the least."

"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."

"Climb into the skin of a person and walk around in it."

"This time we aren't fighting the Yankees, we're fighting our own."

"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."

"I'm tired of a man who cheats himself on his voting."

"Anything fit to say at the table's fit to say in front of anybody."

"You've got to make allowances for the Cunninghams."

"The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom."

"This case, Tom Robinson's case, is something that goes to the essence of a man's conscience."

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

"Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us to try to win."

"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway."

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life."

"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."

"There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one."

"You've got to make allowances for the simple hell-fire of everyday living."