TKAM Quotes Project

Select any two of the quotes below. You will explore the significance of your personal experiences using narration, description, or exposition. You will need to draw comparisons between specific incidents and broader themes that illustrate the writer's important beliefs or generalizations about life.

v Copy the quotation directly and cite the author

v State what you think the quotation means.

v Give your own reasons why the quotation has some truth behind it (You may use your own observations, based on personal experience).

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

Edward R. Murrow (1908 - 1965), television broadcast, December 31, 1955

Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest of violence.

Francis Jeffrey (1773 - 1850)

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.

George Aiken

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), 'Economy,' Walden, 1854

When the judgement's weak,

The prejudice is strong.

Kane O'Hara

There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.

Sydney Smith (1771 - 1845)

Prejudice is opinion without judgment.

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.

W. C. Fields (1880 - 1946)

Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room.

William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely re-arranging their prejudices.

William James (1842 - 1910)

Unless man is committed to the belief that all mankind are his brothers, then he labors in vain and hypocritically in the vineyards of equality.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (1908 - 1972), 'Black Power: A Form of Godly Power,' 1967

Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Politics

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

In the state of nature...all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.

Charles de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755)

The love of democracy is that of equality.

Charles de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755)

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell (1903 - 1950), "Animal Farm"

Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.

Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975)

As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Moral Sayings, First Century B.C.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

US Declaration of Independence

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.

George Santayana (1863 - 1952), "The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis"

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.

Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), in Good Housekeeping

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

Amelia Earhart (1897 - 1937), Courage, 1927

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

Anais Nin (1903 - 1977), The Diary of Anais Nin, volume 3, 1939-1944

Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.

Clare Booth Luce (1903 - 1987), in Reader's Digest, 1979

The bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage and act accordingly.

Corra Harris

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.

Dorothy Bernard

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared.

Eddie Rickenbacker (1890 - 1973)

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.

Harold Wilson (1916 - 1995)

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.

Harper Lee (1926 - ), To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.

Jean Paul Richter (1763 - 1825)

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.

John Quincy Adams (1767 - 1848)

Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway.

John Wayne (1907 - 1979)

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

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

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Let bravery be thy choice, but not bravado.

Menander (342 BC - 292 BC)

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.

Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)

Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.

Thomas Fuller (1608 - 1661)

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.

Thomas Fuller (1608 - 1661)