Being ourselves means sometimes having to find the courage to stand alone, totally alone.

It takes special bravery to honor yourself when the crowd is pressuring you not to. It's easier just to give in. You didn't give in to the crowd today. You stood strong in what you felt and knew. To me, that's the greatest bravery. That's true confidence, which means loyalty to self.

The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.

It shouldn’t take courage to be yourself. It shouldn’t take courage to go to school and walk down the halls as the person you know you are. It shouldn’t take courage to hold the hand of the person you love on a bus, to kiss them goodbye on the sidewalk, to share one of the most fundamental and beautiful connections that any one of us can have in this life. It shouldn’t but, too often and in too many places, it still does. And in some way, all of you here today have called on that courage. And you’ve used your voice to say: We will not go back. We will not let the progress that we’ve fought for slip away.

You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody.

Be brave to stand for what you believe in even if you stand alone.

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

When you have decided what you believe, what you feel must be done, have the courage to stand alone and be counted.

It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I ran across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking up a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one's fellows.

The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before.

Stand up for what you believe in even if you are standing alone

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

Stand up for what is right even if you're standing alone.

A man is not independent unless he has the courage to stand alone.