#cowardice

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#morality #pip #wrong

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice. ↗

— Mark Twain

#cowardice #good #protections #several #surest

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

The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of 'sexual McCarthyism', an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#arkansas #bill-clinton #corruption #cowardice #debate

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

— Rollo May

#courage #cowardice #opposite #our #society

Like all bullies and marauders, Gos was a coward at heart ↗

— L. Frank Baum

#cowardice #courage

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#writing #courage

It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen. ↗

— Herodotus

#cowardice #courage

Do not be afraid. Because if you let these fears consume you, you’ll most likely fail even before everything else starts. ↗

— Veronica Mist

#cowardice #inspirational #courage

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice. ↗

— William Faulkner

#cowardice #courage