“Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.” ——Thoreau
“It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.” ——A. A. Hodge
“It is curious — curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.” ——Mark Twain
“Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.” ——Susan B. Anthony
“Following the path of least resistance is what makes rivers and men crooked.” ——Author Unknown
“Silence is evil’s closest ally.” ——Gary Amirault
“Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” ——Mark Twain
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” ——Gandhi
“New paradigms put everyone practicing the old paradigm at risk. The higher one’s position, the greater the risk. The better you are at your paradigm, the more you have invested in it, the more you have to lose by changing paradigms.” ——Joel Arthur Barker
“True courage is not the absence of fear — but the willingness to proceed in spite of it.” ——Author Unknown
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” ——William Shakespeare
“A certain amount of opposition is great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with the wind.” ——John Neal
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” ——E.F. Schumacher
“In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.” ——Edward Gibbon
“Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.” ——Robert Louis Stevenson
“One man with courage makes a majority.” ——Andrew Jackson
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” ——Plato
“To know how to say what other people only think, is what makes men poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers.” ——Elizabeth Rundle
“Fear comes from the Adamic nature — faith comes from the Christ nature.” ——Jacquelyn K. Heasley
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” ——Robert Frost
“People tend to want to follow the beaten path. The difficulty is that the beaten path doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere.” ——Charles M. Mathias
“If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t go anywhere.” ——Author Unknown
“But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” ——Thucydides
“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is — try to please everybody.” ——Herbert Bayard Swope
“Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” ——James Bryant Conant
“The greatest mistake in life is to be continually fearing that you will make one.” ——Elbert Hubbard
“All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.” ——Adlai E. Stevenson
“Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” ——Edmund Burke
“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” ——Bob Dylan
“Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave.” ——Mark Twain
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” ——Henry David Thoreau
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” ——Martin Luther King Jr.
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ——Anais Nin
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” ——Martin Luther King Jr.
“If we emphasize the life and works of our greatest contributors, people will come to realize that moral courage is bravery of the highest type, and America will be called the ‘Champion of Peace.'” ——Senator Spark Matsunaga
“Find out just what people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” ——Frederick Douglass
“A time comes when silence is betrayal.” ——Rev. Martin Luther King
“When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it — at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice.” ——Mumia Abu-Jamal
“Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it politic? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular — but one must take it simply because it is right.” ——Martin Luther King Jr.
“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.” ——Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The greatest of fault, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” ——Robert Carlyle
“We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” ——Author Unknown
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.” ——Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” ——Sir Edmund Burke
“Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honour, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means.” ——Charles Dickens
“DO NOT KEEP SILENT when your own ideas and values are being attacked. If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell.” ——Ayn Rand
“When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.” ——William Blake
“In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.” ——Thich Nhat Hanh
“The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.” ——Charles Eliot Norton
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” ——Abraham Lincoln
“Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.” ——Albert Einstein
“As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.” ——Clarence Darrow