"Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It's knowing you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

"Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it."

"She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl."

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

"There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible."

"Things are never as bad as they seem."

"There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them."

"That boy is your company. And if he wants to eat up that tablecloth, you let him, you hear?"

"As a reader I loathe introductions...Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity."

"Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends."

"Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

"Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere."

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

"They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night."

"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."

"Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'."

"Things are always better in the morning."

"People have now got the ability to speak to each other across continents: to join with each other in communities that are not based simply on territory, streets, but networks; and you've got the possibility of people building alliances right across the world."

"If you look at the question of expenditure in Iraq, you have got to start from the one fundamental truth: that every request that the military commanders made to us for equipment was answered. No request was ever turned down."

"To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots."

"While you cannot deliver policies without principles, you cannot deliver principles without having power. You have quickly to move to a stage where, emphasising your principles, you build a programme, then call for popular support."

"I hate prejudice, discrimination, and snobbishness of any kind - it always reflects on the person judging and not the person being judged. Everyone should be treated equally."

"Climate change is a consequence of the build up of greenhouse gases over the past 200 years in the atmosphere, and virtually all these emissions came from the rich countries."

"It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present."