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Prejudice

• "There are just some kind of men.. who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one..."
  • “Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.” “
    • Mrs Dubose: “your father’s no better than the niggers and trash he works for.”
      • “She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man.”
• "Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong...."
• “How can you hate Hitler so bad an’ then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home-?”
• "cheatin‘ a colored man is ten times worse than cheatin’ a white man,”
• "Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.”
  • "There are just some kind of men who—who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."
• "In our courts all men are created equal" (hypocritical)
  • its hard to explain- ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody’s favouring Negroes over and above themselves.”
• Mrs Merriweather: "Hypocrites, Mrs Perkins, born hypocrites....At least we don't have that sin on our shoulders"
• Atticus says that "The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience"
  • Francis (Scout & Jem’s cousin): “nigger-lover”

Empathy and Understanding

• "You never really understand a person... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
  • “Yes, suh. I felt right sorry for her, she seemed to try more’n the rest of ‘em—”
    • Reverend Sykes tells Scout: "Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin,"
• "Jem, she's old and ill. You can't hold her responsible for her actions."
• Scout: “Hey Boo”
• "Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in"
• “I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in his house all this time...it’s because he wants to stay inside.”
• "Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"
• "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."
  • "But remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they're [the residents of Maycomb are] still our friends and this is still our home"
    • "As Atticus once advised me to do, I tried to climb into Jem's skin and walk around in it."
      • “I sometimes felt a twinge of remorse, when passing by the old place, at ever having taken part in what must have been sheer torment to Arthur Radley”
  • "I certainly am.  I do my best to love everybody....it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name.  It just shows how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you."

Innocence and its Removal

• "did you put cement in that hole in that tree down yonder?"
• "I always thought Maycomb folks were the best folks in the world. Least that’s what they seemed.”
  • Mr Raymond to Scout: “You haven’t seen enough of the world yet,”
    • “Tom's dead.”
• "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. ... That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
• Dill: "I don't care one speck. It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way."
  • “Shoot all the bluejays you want… but remember it’s a sin To Kill a Mockingbird”
    • Atticus - "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?”
      • Atticus: "As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life…  whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is… that white man is trash."
• "You haven't even seen this town, but all you gotta do is step back inside the courthouse."
• Mr Raymond: "Because you're children and you can understand it"
• Jem's reaction to trial: "and his shoulders jerked as if each 'guilty' was a separate stab between them"
• He likened Tom's death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds"
• "Will you take me home?"
  • “Naw Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks” Jem: “If there’s one kind of folk, why can’t they get along with each other?”

Growing up

• Calpurnia sent me through the swinging door with a stinging smack. I told Calpurnia to just wait: I'd fix her..."Hush your fussin'" she said."
  • "Calpurnia was all angles and bones... her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard."
    • "Our battles were epic and one-sided. Calpurnia always won.”
      • "Jem and I found our father satisfactory; he played with us, read to us, with courteous detachment."
    • "I've no intention of getting rid of her, now or never. You think about how much Cal does for you, and you mind her, you hear now?"
• "In Calpurnia's teaching, there was no sentimentality; I seldom pleased her and she seldom rewarded me."
  • "I felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember "
    • "Atticus always took her side."

Racism

• "it ain't your fault if Uncle Atticus is a nigger-lover"
• "Negroes worshipped in it on Sundays and white men gambled in it on weekdays."
• "You know what we want. Get aside from the door, Mr Finch."
• "just in-betweens, don't belong anywhere"
• "I seen that black nigger yonder ruttin' on my Mayella!"
• "Judge, I've asked this county for fifteen years to clean out that nest down yonder."
• "Mr Finch, if you was a nigger like me, you'd be scared, too."
• "You felt sorry for her, you felt sorry for her?"
• "Cry about the hell white people give coloured folk, without even stopping to think that they're people, too."
• "that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings..."

Courage

• "If I didn't I couldn’t hold up my head in town, I couldn't represent this county in the legislature, I couldn't even tell you or Jem not to do something again."
  • "Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win"
    • "I wanted you to see what real courage is....According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew."
• “you know 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.”
  • “I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them”
• “It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”
  • Atticus tells Scout that he “couldn’t go to church and worship God if [he] didn’t try to help that man”

Coming of age

• "Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!"
• Mr. Raymond, when Dill older, will no longer "cry about the simple hell people give other people--without even thinking.
  • Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people, too."