We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
Maya Angelou

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.
Maya Angelou

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
Maya Angelou

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou

One man with courage is a majority.
Thomas Jefferson

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein

You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence.
Abraham Lincoln

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.
Ronald Reagan

There are no easy answers' but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.
Ronald Reagan

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Winston Churchill

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Winston Churchill

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?
William Shakespeare

How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.
Benjamin Franklin

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
Nelson Mandela

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
Mark Twain

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

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.
John F. Kennedy

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten.
John F. Kennedy