Quotes by Harper Lee

“I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but i know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.....Mockingbir...”

“The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can't scare us with the essential inferiority line, they'll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that's the only thing they know is feared in ...”

“I had never encountered a being who deliberately perpetuated fraud against himself.”

“I do my best to love everybody...I'm hard put,sometimes- baby,its never an insult o be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is,it doesn't hurt you.”

“I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days. You don't have it yet, but you have a shadow of the beginnings of it. You haven't the humbleness of mind-" "I thought the...”

“It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”

“I wanted you to see something about herI wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. Its when you know youre licked before you ...”

“She was the bravest person I ever knew.”

“Things are always better in the morning.”

“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.”

“...summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking, the longing we sometimes felt each other feel. With him life was routine; without him life was unbea...”

“We can't always have our druthers.”

“As you grow older, youll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and dont you forget itwhenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is...”

“Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' comp'ny, and don't you let me catch you remarkin' on their ways like you was so high and and mighty! Yo' folks might be better'n the...”

“As Kipling said, thats another story...”

“Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a Graham from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state legislature. He was middle-aged then, she was f...”

“We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe. Some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because theyre born with it, some men ma...”

“As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for his lessons.”

“Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?”

“If hes not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets”