Quotes on Cowardice

That which in mean men we entitle patience is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.

Valor lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.

Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

...it is a sneaking piece of cowardice for authors to put feigned names to their works, as if, like bastards of their brain, they were afraid to own them.

She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honour, for love.

All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.

Laziness and cowardice explain why so many men. . . remain under a life-long tutelage and why it is so easy for some men to set themselves up as the guardians of all the rest. . . If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides my diet, I need not trouble myself. If I am willing to pay, I need not think. Others will do it for me.

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.

Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.

Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

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.

I have in my own life merely carried to the extreme that which you have never ventured to carry even halfway ; and what's more, you've regarded your cowardice as prudence, and found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that, in fact, I may be even more "alive" than you are. Do take a closer look!

Cowardice is impotence worse than violence. The coward desires revenge but being afraid to die, he looks to others, maybe to the government of the day, to do the work of defense for him. A coward is less than a man. He does not deserve to be a member of a society of men and women.

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

If it is true that cowardice is the most grave vice, then the dog, at least, is not guilty of it.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.