Civic Courage Quotes & Sayings

So what do you want? Does what happens inside show on the outside? There is such a great fire in one's soul, and yet nobody ever comes to warm themselves there, and passersby see nothing but a little smoke coming from the top of the chimney, and go on their way. — Vincent Van Gogh

Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just. — Dahlia Lithwick

A poet must sing for his own people. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved - by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain? — Joseph Campbell

A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator. — Steven Berkoff

Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed - there's so little competition. — Elbert Hubbard

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized. — Oscar Wilde

But the friendship of a despot is ever a dangerous honour. — Kakuzo Okakura

What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared. — William James

When gettin' off wasn't worth puttin' up with her, I ended it — Kristen Ashley

Those are weaklings who know the truth and uphold it as long as it suits their purpose, and then abandon it. — Blaise Pascal

Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. — George Will

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

:I am Topaz,: the unicorn on the hill haughtily announced, :and this is my vale.:
:I was not aware unicorns could own vales,: Wareska linked.
The unicorn stiffened, and even from this distance, Wareska could see her bright, golden eyes narrow dangerously. :Now you know,: she said with quiet menace. — Ash Gray

When I am searching for something, it is always waiting for me with open arms. — Debasish Mridha

Not everything that steps out of line, and thus "abnormal", must necessarily be "inferior". — Hans Asperger

And as a child I was filled with passionate admiration for acts of civic courage I had seen performed by an elderly military doctor, who was a friend of my family. — Rene Cassin

Think of life as a story. Each one must come to an end, for it to have form and meaning. What gives life to the stories are the bodies at the end of them. — Rajesh Parameswaran

He was a creature who knew three hundred religions, yet had faith in none of them. So, — Brandon Sanderson

Because racism was alive and real as shit. It was everywhere and all mixed up in everything, and the only people who said it wasn't, and the only people who said, "Don't talk about it" were white. Well, stop lying. That's what I wanted to tell those people. Stop lying. Stop denying. That's why I was marching. Nothing was going to change unless we did something about it. We! White people! — Jason Reynolds

No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February. — Edward Abbey