#cowardice

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion. ↗

— Eric Hoffer

#becomes #both #cowardice #easily #fashion

To be one's self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity. ↗

— Irving Wallace

#conformity #cowardice #easy #more #right

How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present ↗

— Robert Walser

#class-warfare #courage #cowardice #inequality #money

Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#fear #love #life

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity. ↗

— Rollo May

#courage #cowardice #opposite #our #society

Christians take Scriptures out of context to try to justify or to vindicate retreat and cowardice. ↗

— Randall Terry

#context #cowardice #justify #out #retreat

We ought instead of retreating should follow up the enemy and take Richmond. And in full view of all responsible for such declaration, I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason. ↗

— Philip Kearny

#declaration #enemy #follow #full #i

But the only way never to do the wrong thing is never to do anything. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#harry-dresden #inaction #life #molly-carpenter #life

-[...] comme vous me paraissez amateur; car lorsque je suis entré vous regardiez mes tableaux, je vous demande la permission de vous faire voir ma galerie : tous tableaux anciens, tous tableaux de maîtres garantis comme tels ; je n'aime pas les modernes. -Vous avez raison, monsieur, car ils ont en général un grand défaut : c'est celui de n'avoir pas encore eu le temps de devenir des anciens. ↗

— Alexandre Dumas

#art #cowardice #humor #repartee #art

The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#the-west #united-nations #weakness #courage