Quotes About 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.

People are sheep—cowardly, deplorable sheep.

More often than not, the demons of our nature love a recluse; nobody is more vulnerable to himself than the solitary. To imagine that one can simply withdraw, and somehow achieve peace, or wisdom, or detachment, is a mistake. It is also, in most cases, inappropriate, selfish, and even cowardly.

He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn't.

Because I'm selfish. I'm a coward. I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die.

Fear has its uses but cowardice has none.

The chief surely knows that his job is to be on the right side of the Constitution, blatherings about the 'wrong side of history' are an appeal to intellectual cowardice. – Edward Whelan

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

The lie is the biggest cowardness and complexity of a liar.

The young man rushed toward them. "Stand and fight!" he was shouting. "Is running away the Yoshioka version of the Art of War? I personally don't want to kill you, but my Drying Pole's still thirsty. The least you can do, cowards that you are, is leave your heads behind.

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

Stalin, whose bullying nature contained a strong streak of cowardice

To die in order to avoid the pains of poverty, love, or anything that is disagreeable, is not the part of a brave man, but of a coward.

The coward calls the brave man rash, the rash man calls him a coward.

Bravery is a mean state concerned with things that inspire confidence and with things fearful ... and leading us to choose danger and to face it, either because to do so is noble, or because not to do so is base. But to court death as an escape from poverty, or from love, or from some grievous pain, is no proof of bravery, but rather of cowardice.

If you want to send a manuscript, send it to an agent. And send a letter first, asking permission. Launch it into the real world of cold-blooded commercial response, not into the fantasyland of wishful thinking, cowardice and surrender to Resistance.

It's a curse—this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I did not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy... In other words, Scarlett, I am a coward.

I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.

You deliberately don't ask the questions to which you would rather not know the answers. You call it trust. You know too late that it is cowardice.

One can wrap the truth in palatable euphemisms for only so long, then it chokes in the throat and the lies suffocate. One ends in hating those who force the deceit by their expectancy, their fear, their cowardice, their sheer lack of understanding of the reality of pain and loss.

Who were the men who did this? Guido demanded suddenly. Tonio was putting on his cloak. He looked up as if already in deep thought. Fools, he answered, at the command of a coward.

Who were the men who did this? Guido demanded suddenly. Tonio was putting on his cloack. He looked up as if already in deep thought. Fools, he answered, at the command of a coward. page 139

The coward's fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others' lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. — J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors

Cowardice is another form of community betrayal, and most Indian tribes punished it with immediate death. (If that seems harsh, consider that the British military took "cowards" off the battlefield and executed them by firing squad as late as World War I.)