It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

A man of great common sense and good taste, - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.

We need justice. We need toleration, honesty and moral courage. These are modern virtues without which we cannot hope to control the forces science has let loose among us.

None of us can hope to get anywhere without character, moral courage and the spiritual strength to accept responsibility.

Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.

Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

Don't fight forces; use them.