I first read To Kill a Mockingbird in school.
I thought it was just a book about racism. About a trial. About a small town in Alabama.
I was wrong.
It's a book about how people see each other. About courage and conscience. About growing up and watching the adults around you disappoint you.
These quotes are the reason people still read this book 60+ years later.
Quick Facts
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
- Published in 1960.
- Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.
- One of the best-selling novels of all time.
- Narrated by Scout Finch, a young girl growing up in the American South.
The Quotes
1. On Empathy
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
Atticus says this to Scout early in the book.
It became one of the most quoted lines in all of literature. And for good reason. This is the whole lesson of the book in one sentence.
2. On Reading
"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
Scout says this.
We don't think about reading the way we think about breathing. But once you've lost access to books, or felt what it's like to be unable to read, it changes how you see it.
3. On Conscience
"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
Atticus again.
What the crowd thinks doesn't matter. What you know is right matters. This is so simple. It's also so hard to live.
4. On People
"I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks."
Jem says this.
He's a child when he says it. And somehow that makes it even more powerful. Children see what adults pretend not to see.
5. On Perception
"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for."
Judge Taylor says this during the trial.
If you expect the worst in people, you'll find it. If you look for the good, you'll find that too. This quote aged incredibly well.
6. On Pride
"People in their right minds never take pride in their talents."
Miss Maudie says this.
Talent is just something you were born with or stumbled into. Character is what you build. There's a difference.
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7. On Guilt
"I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society."
Atticus says this in his closing argument.
The accused man committed no crime. What happened was that someone broke an unwritten social rule. And an innocent man paid the price.
This line makes me ache every time.
8. On Hypocrisy
"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another."
Miss Maudie says this.
She's talking about people who obsess over the next world while being cruel in this one. I've met those people. Haven't you?
9. On Not Worrying
"It's not time to worry yet."
Atticus says this so often throughout the book.
I love this. Worry before you need to, and you'll waste all your energy. Wait until it's actually time. Then deal with it.
10. On Cheating and Character
"Whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."
Atticus says this to Scout.
He's not softening it. He's not being polite. He's telling his daughter the plain truth. Cruelty is cruelty. Fine clothes and a good family name don't change that.
11. On Children and Truth
"Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults."
This made me laugh.
Kids know when you're dodging something. They don't have the social training yet to pretend they don't notice. Adults learn to play along. Children don't.
12. On Mockingbirds
"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
Miss Maudie explains this to Scout.
Mockingbirds don't do anything harmful. They just sing. Killing something innocent and harmless for no reason is the real sin. The title of the whole book lives in this quote.
13. On Insulting Strangers
"Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?"
Mrs. Dubose says this.
We judge people so fast. We make assumptions. And we never stop to think about what someone's life actually looks like.
14. On Friendship
"With him, life was routine, without him, life was unbearable."
Scout says this about Dill.
It's a beautiful line about what it means to have someone who matters to you. Simple. Perfect.
15. On Atticus
"With his infinite capacity for calming turbulent seas, he could make a rape case as dry as a sermon."
This is how Scout describes her father's ability to stay calm.
Atticus never loses his cool. Even in the most devastating moments. He is steady. That steadiness is what makes him so powerful.
16. On Small Towns
"In Maycomb, if one went for a walk with no definite purpose in mind, it was correct to believe one's mind incapable of definite purpose."
Small towns know everything about you. Even your walk.
Scout is capturing the suffocating familiarity of Maycomb. Everyone's watching. Everyone's judging.
17. On Humanity
"All the little white man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was that, if he scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white."
Atticus in his closing argument.
He is saying, plainly, to the jury: this man has nothing except skin color. That's it. That's the whole of his claim to superiority.
It was brave to say it in 1960. It still lands hard today.
18. On Courage
"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."
Atticus says this to Jem about Mrs. Dubose after she dies.
Mrs. Dubose was fighting her morphine addiction in her final weeks. She was difficult and mean and nobody liked her. But she was fighting something real. That, Atticus says, is actual courage. Not bravado. Not strength. Choosing to fight when you know you might lose.
19. On Trying Anyway
"Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win."
Atticus says this to Scout about Tom Robinson's case.
He knows he will probably lose. He takes the case anyway. This line is about doing the right thing even when the odds are completely against you. I think about this one a lot.
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20. On What Bravery Looks Like
"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."
Scout says this about Atticus.
He never fought in a war. He didn't have a dramatic backstory. He just kept doing the right thing quietly, every single day. Scout understood something most adults miss. That's the hardest kind of brave.
21. On Justice
"The courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal."
Atticus says this in his closing argument.
He's saying it as a plea and a reminder. The courtroom is supposed to be the one place where your skin color, your money, your family name don't matter. He's asking the jury to actually live up to that promise.
They don't. But he still believed it was worth saying.
22. On Innocence
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us."
Miss Maudie says this when she explains why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
This is the full version of that famous line. And it's even better in full. Pure innocence. Pure giving. And people destroy it anyway.
23. On Fitting In
"You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat."
Atticus says this to Scout before school.
She's about to face kids who are talking about her father defending a Black man. He's not telling her to fight back. He's telling her to stay dignified. To not let other people's ugliness become her problem.
24. On Living With Yourself
"Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself."
Atticus says this.
Short. Quiet. Everything.
He's not looking for approval. He's not playing to the crowd. He's doing what lets him sleep at night. That's it.
25. On Class and Background
"Background doesn't mean Old Family. I never understood why background means so much to people around here."
Miss Maudie says this.
Maycomb is obsessed with who your family is and how long you've been in town. Miss Maudie cuts right through it. Where you came from doesn't make you good. What you do does.
26. On Boo Radley
"Maybe, someday, we would see him. I imagined how it would seem to him if he could see us rushing to him now — rushing to see a poor devil who'd never done us any harm."
Scout says this about Boo Radley near the end.
The whole book, Boo is this mysterious figure the children are scared of. By the end, Scout understands he was never the monster. He was just lonely. And they had spent years treating him like a ghost.
This one is quiet and heartbreaking.
27. On Truth
"The truth is not always a pleasant thing."
Atticus says this.
Three words would have done it: truth is hard. But Harper Lee gives us six and makes it feel more honest somehow. Truth doesn't care about being pleasant. It just is.
28. On What We Owe Each Other
"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it — whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."
Atticus says this to Scout.
He's not hedging. He's not softening it for a child. He's telling her exactly how the world works and exactly what he thinks of it. Parents who tell their kids hard truths like this are doing something important.
29. On Doing What's Right
"Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The only thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
This one deserves to close the list.
Atticus knew the verdict before the trial ended. Everyone in that town knew. But he stood up anyway and gave everything he had. Not because he thought he'd win. Because it was right.
That's the whole book.
About Harper Lee
Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama in 1926. She studied law at the University of Alabama. To Kill a Mockingbird was her first novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.
She published very little after that. For decades, people wondered if she would ever write again. In 2015, a second novel called Go Set a Watchman was published.
She passed away on February 19, 2016.
Final Thoughts
These 29 quotes are just a small piece of why this book matters.
It's not just about race, though it is about that. It's about how we treat people we think are beneath us. It's about the gap between who we say we are and who we actually are.
And it's about a little girl watching all of this happen, trying to make sense of it.
If you haven't read it, read it. If you read it in school, read it again as an adult. You will get something completely different from it.
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Which of these quotes is your favorite? Tell me in the comments.
