Courage quotes

Words about acting rightly in the face of fear, risk and doubt.

• The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

• So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

• So much of woman’s excitement through the ages has been pushing the men into adventure that they have the habit of hanging back a little.

• Inheritance, training and environment seem to make women less aggressive than men, although in real courage I think they are equals.

• That's one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind.

• Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or to lose.

• The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.

• The bold enterprises are the successful ones. Take counsel of hopes rather than of fears to win in this business.

• The right of self defense never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals, and whether the attack be made by Spain herself or by those who abuse her power, its obligation is not the less strong.

• Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

• Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

• I too am not a bit tamed . . . . I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

• The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

• O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is over-run with oppression.

• The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.

• May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.

• Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers as an offender against law, therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty, property and—

• No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.

• Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word.

• Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

• The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

• Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.

• LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

• I hated slavery, always, and the desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze, to fan it into a blaze, at any moment.

• The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

• The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your christianity as a lie.

• Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.

• There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.

• …it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

• What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

• You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

• It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

• Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

• To be great is to be misunderstood.

• Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

• Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.