Civic Courage Quotes

Civic courage is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

If there is liberty, if there is democracy, in this country, it will stand or fall with the right of the minority to express to the full force of language its opposition in public to the policies of the government. And it will stand or fall with the courage of the minority so to express itself.

In the final analysis, a democratic government represents the sum total of the courage and the integrity of its individuals. It cannot be better than they are.

We must know what we think and speak out, even at the risk of unpopularity. In the final analysis, a democratic government represents the sum total of the courage and the integrity of its individuals. It cannot be better than they are.

Not just for the U.S. Senate but it also means for school board and city council. We need to revitalize American democracy. We need to have people at all - all over this country, having the courage to take on big money and demand a set of policies that work for all of us and not just for the few.

What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity.

Courage means standing next to someone you don't always agree with for the betterment of the country.

If the City Council wants to hold the police accountable, it has the subpoena power and oversight responsibility to do so. They don't have the courage to do it.

I'm proud to be from a country where I can speak up.

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

You put these politicians in office, but then you've got to tell them what you want them to do. And it's intimidating to most people. I was intimidated by it. I mean, calling my senator or writing my senator? I'm like, what do I say? What do I do? But we're showing people that the political process is actually less intimidating than we think.

And as a child I was filled with passionate admiration for acts of civic courage I had seen performed by an elderly military doctor, who was a friend of my family.

Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk.

Education as a democratic project always presupposes a vision of the future in its introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life. It is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. As a moral and political practice, education produces the modes of literacy, critique, sense of social responsibility, and civic courage necessary to imbue young people with the knowledge and skills needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens willing to fight for a sustainable and just society.

The thing about veterans, they know how to challenge the establishment. They're not afraid to take on the people in control. They're not afraid to put people over politics or over their political party.

There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance. Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which ... campaigns anonymously … and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.

Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.

The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.