have the guts

1. Possess the courage, as in Does he have the guts to dive off the high board? This expression replaces the earlier and now obsolete sense of stomach as “courage,” a usage from the early 1500s. [Slang; late 1800s]

Example Sentences

He added: "And if they do not have the guts to criticise America, they should keep silent, not try to justify the aggression."

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"Every time you get your heart broken you have to bounce back and it makes for a better story – but you have to have the guts to keep going after it," Rotella added.

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So while Trump struts around declaring victory, as if this whole thing was a masterclass in geopolitical brinkmanship and not a half-baked tantrum, his loyal foot soldiers are left twisting in the wind — on record, parroting laughable justifications for an industrial policy plan their guy now clearly doesn’t have the guts, or attention span, to complete.

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Before they met, Dresdner remembers seeing Zapata on campus and feeling “inspired and intimidated” by her but says he didn’t have “the guts” to talk to her.

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“I mean pay them, pay them what they’re worth. Absolutely. But these people who have such a burden in their hearts for helping people, they work way past their shift time if they need to, they do things that the rest of us do not have the guts to do nor the stomach to perform.”

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