Harper Lee Quotes

The best soldiers are not warlike

The strength to kill is not essential for self-defense; one ought to have the strength to die. When a man is fully ready to die, he will not even desire to offer violence. Indeed, I may put it down as a self-evident proposition that the desire to kill is in inverse proportion to the desire to die. And history is replete with instances of men who by dying with courage and compassion on their lips converted the hearts of their violent opponents.

I'm a pacifist by nature.

It is better to be killed than to kill.

Nonviolence and cowardice go ill together. True nonviolence is an impossibility without the possession of unadulterated fearlessness.

I'm not a pacifist. I'm not that brave.

I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life

My pacifism is not based on any intellectual theory but on a deep antipathy to every form of cruelty and hatred.

I am an absolute pacifist...It is an instinctive feeling. It is a feeling that possesses me, because the murder of men is disgusting.

Nonviolence is the greatest virtue, cowardice the greatest vice - nonviolence springs from love, cowardice from hate.

It was men who stopped slavery. It was men who ran up the stairs in the Twin Towers to rescue people. It was men who gave up their seats on the lifeboats of the Titanic. Men are made to take risks and live passionately on behalf of others.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

Heroic people take risks to themselves to help others. There's nothing heroic about accepting $5 million to go out and run around chasing a ball, although you may show fortitude or those other qualities while you do it.

My Dad is my hero. He's 85 now and he is in great health. He is handsome and strong. He has an incredible moral and ethical backbone. I couldn't have been luckier with my parents.

I am a pacifist.

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.

Even a pacifist should admire the military virtues.

People aren't universally heroic.

Violence isn't really my thing.

I'm a pacifist.

I'm really a pacifist.

Some guy refuses to fight and we call that the sin, but he's standing up for what he believes in and that seems pretty damned American to me.

Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another.

Individual courage is the only interesting thing in life.

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.