Freedom. And Justice. If you have those two, it covers everything. You must stick to those principles and have the courage of your convictions.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

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

I’m not a fighter, but I would love to be a boxer because I love the courage and toughness. I mean, there can be nothing more terrifying than walking into an arena and looking at Mike Tyson in the ring.

Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.

As a gay Jewish white South African, I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. You constantly have to question who you are, what you are and whether you have the courage to be who you are.

Courage is poorly housed that dwells in numbers the lion never counts the herd that are about him, nor weighs how many flocks he has to scatter.

Moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage.