Meaning

Angelou is making a claim about the hierarchy of virtues: courage is not simply one good quality among many but the foundational one that makes all others functional. Honesty, kindness, fairness, and compassion are easy enough to endorse in the abstract. But actually practicing them, especially when it is inconvenient or costly, requires bravery. Without courage, every other virtue risks collapsing under pressure into mere intention. The word "consistently" is key: it shifts the question from whether someone holds good values to whether they can act on them reliably.

Context

Angelou made this remark in a 1988 interview with USA Today, though she returned to the idea in various forms throughout her public life. It is a view with roots in classical moral philosophy, where thinkers similarly debated which virtue underpinned the rest. Angelou brings it into a personal, practical register rather than a purely theoretical one. Her argument makes particular sense given her own biography, as she spent decades speaking and writing on subjects, including race, trauma, and identity, that required genuine courage to address publicly and honestly.

About the author

Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights advocate born in 1928. She rose to international prominence with her autobiographical writing and became one of the most recognizable literary figures in the United States. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among many other honors, and was known for the moral seriousness she brought to all of her public work. Her reflections on courage were grounded in a life that demanded it repeatedly, lending her words on the subject a credibility that purely theoretical statements about virtue rarely carry.