"Screw your courage to the sticking-place," says Lady Macbeth to her doomed husband in Shakespeare's tragedy, "and we'll not fail." But fail they do and no amount of courage in the world can save them or turn them into heroes. Courage is a funny thing. It's a bit like happiness: the more you seek it, the more you demand it, the more you try to call it up, the less it shows its face.

Words can stir us to courage but only when they are grounded in confident expectation and hitched to unshakable values or realities. Who would not rally around the "I have a dream…" speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., in which he paints the colors of freedom? Who would not feel stronger listening to the dogged determination of Winston Churchill in the dark days of 1940: "Let us... brace ourselves to ou…