"And it's certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don't know of any landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father can hit. Of course he shouldn't, but he'll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?"

"As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me."

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

"Well, they’re Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn’t dream of interrupting you at golf."

"Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read. Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink."

"Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in."

"She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl."

"Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ‘em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language."

"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. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

"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."

"It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived."

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience."

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

"I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. “Your father's right," she said. "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."

"Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses... were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara."

"Every second, ten stars set behind the black water in the west."

"Dr Slade went in to lunch in a state of desperate boredom tempered with resentment; it had shaken him a little to see how bad luck could be prolonged to such unlikely lengths."

"We're all monsters," said Daisy with enthusiasm. "It's the Age of Monsters."

"For God's sake, sit down. You look like a Calvinist rector telling his flock about Hell."

"Africa was a big place and would offer its own suggestions"

"A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose."

"So she said banteringly: "What's the unit of exchange in this different world of yours?" He did not hesitate. "The tear." "It isn't fair," she objected. "Some people have to work very hard for a tear. Others can have them just for thinking." "What system of exchange is fair?" he cried, and his voice sounded as if he were really drunk. "And whoever invented the concept of fairness, anyway? Isn't everything easier if you simply get rid of the idea of justice altogether? You think the quantity of pleasure, the degree of suffering is constant among all men? It somehow comes out in the end? You think that? If it comes out even it's only because the final sum is zero.""

"No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it's the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people's indifference is the only horror."

"For in order to avoid having to deal with relative values, he had long since come to deny all purpose to the phenomenon of existence — it was more expedient and comforting."

"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

"A mighty burst of rain assaulted the canvas, conjuring Gettysburg: his hour of glory, of triumph. The smoke, confusion, and carnage had calmed to reveal his army victorious. Lee had been defeated. Lee! His elation on that July afternoon had soared beyond all words, beyond his deathly exhaustion, and he had thought, mistakenly, that all might be well thereafter. Only to spend the night wrapped in an oilcloth, sitting on a rock amid the mud, under a tree that channeled the rain into torrents. Every roof had been required for the wounded his victory cost. The wounded, in their legions. Damn Washington, and damn the New York papers. None of the men in frock coats and cravats understood the human side of an army. How they had howled- and were howling still- because he had not chased Lee like an ill-trained dog. They refused to hear that three hard days of battle had left tens of thousands of wounded men in his care and thousands more as prisoners in his hands. They did not want to hear that his army, too, had been mauled and thrown into confusion, that officers had been slaughtered by the hundredfold, that ammunition pouches and caissons had been emptied, that entire divisions had nothing to eat and no water untainted by blood, that the corpses of the brave baked in the sun, or simply that he had done the best he could. The Army of the Potomac had worked a miracle, sending Lee home in shame, but it had not been wonder enough for the stay-at-homes."

"If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a Juniper tree or the wings of a vulture-that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves."

"Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers — obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls."

"God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore."

"The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative."

"If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness."

"I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving."

"An empty man is full of himself."

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

"When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about."

"What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money."

"Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful."

"The "Terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years."

"Freedom begins between the ears."

"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws."

"In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority."

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets."

"The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny."

"Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion."

"Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart."