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

You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured...

I’d rather be the fastest runner than the best fighter. But then I am a supreme coward.

That was the thing to remember about all monsters, They love to frightenpeople, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.

It may…be judged indecent in me to come forward on this occasion; but when I see a fellow-creature about to perish through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak, that I may say what I know of her character.

No one is born to courage, Juliet. Courage is a habit you develop after cowardice has gotten you nothing.

Survival feels like cowardice.

The devil’s happy when the critics run you off.

Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children...

He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.

If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.

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

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...

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!

Only cowards cave. The brave get assassinated.

It is for your own good to love a dare-devil rather than a holy coward. A dare-devil is a unique devil, battling your fears, your pains, conquering your uncertainties, carrying you his arms, and flying out of the corrosive fire. The coward is a trickster serpent, which vanishes in your time of despair, and appears...

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did...

Pacifism is a virtue indistinguishable from cowardice.

You can’t throw kindling on a fire and deny you kept it burning. And right now, cowardice is that kindling.

Cowardice is the fear of contradiction.

The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.

Japan’s biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.

Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.

You and I both know, deep in your heart, you agree with me. And I will prove it with one hypothetical scenario: you are alone in a closet of your home. There`s a bright red button. You can push that button and presto all Negroes and Jews and all other colored people are instantly removed...

You always know the mark of a coward. A coward hides behind freedom. A brave person stands in front of freedom and defends it for others.

She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn’t, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams...

Idiot. Which road do you take when you’re running from something weaker than yourself? Or maybe you’re the one looking for an excuse to back out.

Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy,...

A coward,’ he declared with dignity, when he’d stopped coughing and had got his breath back, ‘dies a hundred times. A brave man dies but once. But Dame Fortune favours the brave and holds the coward in contempt.’— Dandelion

I am quite possibly the world’s bravest coward. I have never backed down from backing down from a fight.

Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?’ I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. ‘What irony?’ I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. ‘That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.

People run away from the love game because they know they won’t win the race.

The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.

The world is ruled by cowards and cravens; brave men have put them there.

* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

A real man—real in all the ways that we recognize as real—finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma, smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he...

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.

There is more to joy than looking only for affirmation; refusing to be challenged is the only bigotry.

Explanations are for cowards.

Tom’s cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.

To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.

It doesn’t prove anything except that you’re bullying us. Which, as I recall, is a sign of cowardice.

Rogue Squadron doesn’t run. Unless we really, really have to.””No, this will be Wraith Squadron’s mission.””We don’t mind running. Even when we don’t have to.

Thinking without acting makes you a coward. Acting without thinking makes you insane. You need both the thoughts and actions; they never walk alone!

She has her helmet, shield and sword. Does she finish him or take pity on the gutless thing before her?Does she set fire and smoke him out, forcing him to fight, or does she let him live with himself and take satisfaction from knowing that he has never been in a real fight in his...

When you don’t fight your adversary, you become the coward in the sight of animalistic breeds, but they forget that your real strength stays in the whisper of your voice.

The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.

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...