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

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About Harper Lee

Portrait of Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016) was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood...

More quotations from Harper Lee

Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories.

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 you see it through no matter what.

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.

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.

—Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird

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More quotations tagged with “popularity”

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.

—Clarence Darrow

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However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.

—Robertson Davies

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Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

—Robert Frost

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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

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Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

—Bertrand Russell

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History

17 Jan 2015 Added