To Kill a Mockingbird (To Kill a Mockingbird, #1)

by Harper Lee

But remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends and this is still our home.”

Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em.

I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.”

called First Purchase because it was paid for from the first earnings of freed slaves. Negroes worshiped in it on Sundays and white men gambled in it on weekdays.

Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.

She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white.

There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.”

“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.

A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.

“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.