52 Quotes About Cowardice

In a world where courage is often celebrated, the concept of cowardice can be both intriguing and complex. It touches on themes of fear, hesitation, and the human condition's vulnerability. Whether viewed as a critical flaw or a relatable human experience, cowardice has been a subject of contemplation for philosophers, writers, and leaders across centuries. This collection of 52 quotes delves into these varied perspectives, offering insights into the nuances of what it means to act—or not act—in the face of fear. Explore these thoughtful reflections on cowardice and consider how they might resonate with your own understanding of bravery and timidity.

1. “Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.” - Cormac McCarthy

2. “The acknowledgement of White cowardice has driven literally tens of millions of White Americans to try to escape it by undergoing a voluntary human metamorphosis and becoming "part-Indian." 95% would become proven liars by a simple DNA test, but their children grow up believing the lie. Abandoning the White race means not having to fight for it or defend it in any way. ” - Frazier Glenn Miller

3. “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.” - Umberto Eco

4. “Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and perceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and last some crisis shows what we have become. ” - Brooke Foss Westcott

5. “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.” - Mahatma Gandhi

6. “Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.” - Oscar Wilde

7. “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

8. “The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.” - Jean Lorrain

9. “As I hear him, I understand that he's not more moronic because of the brandy than he is because of his cowardice.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

10. “When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.” - Lewis Carroll

11. “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!” - Homer

12. “Superstition would seem to be simply cowardice in regard to the supernatural.” - Theophrastus

13. “To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.” - Patrick Ness

14. “You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.” - Khaled Hosseini

15. “I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward's health had anything to do with this, and I don't say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him 'on his deathbed.' He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of 'Orientalism' in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward's revised edition, I decided I'd suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as 'racist.' The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice... I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that's 'it' as it were. I didn't say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. 'Racist' is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn't go to, and wasn't invited to, his funeral.” - Christopher Hitchens

16. “Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.” - Andre Gide

17. “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, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust for war seemed quite honorable in comparison.” - Thomas Mann

18. “The coward says in his heart “There is no love.” Because, standing in the shadows of the big, grand, and powerful existence of love, his small spirit is left feeling even smaller and less significant. And so he chooses to deny the existence of love altogether. Because he is too small to have it.” - C. JoyBell C.

19. “Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.” - John Irving

20. “Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.” - Tariq Ali

21. “Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.” - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

22. “But often life asks much of you, and you either honor life by answering with all your heart, or you cower your way into your grave.” - James Clemens

23. “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.” - Aaron Allston

24. “I'm a fucking coward.""Maybe." Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. "There's a hero. Tell me who's better off.” - Joe Abercrombie

25. “So you were going to rescue the Prince! Why did you pretend to run away? To deceive the Witch?""Not likely! I'm a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!” - Diana Wynne Jones

26. “Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valor, so was cowardice is the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.” - Douglas Adams

27. “If you don't make a few ememies now and then, you're a coward-or worse. Besides, it as worth it to see his reaction. Oh, he was angry!- Angela to Eragon” - Christopher Paolini

28. “Ah, you coward! Look at you, running.""Actually, it's called improvising.” - Jonathan Stroud

29. “Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.” - Norman Mailer

30. “They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.” - Tim O'Brien

31. “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

32. “Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.” - Jose Rizal

33. “We believe that preparation eradicates cowardice, which we define as the failure to act in the midst of fear.” - Veronica Roth

34. “One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.--"Wanda” - Ouida

35. “Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.” - Oliver Goldsmith

36. “I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.” - Ouida

37. “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 to breathe slowly. You tame.” - Frank Herbert

38. “The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.” - Charles M. Blow

39. “Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” - Albert Camus

40. “I once knew a man who was heir to the throne of a great kingdom, he lived as a ranger and fought his destiny to sit on a throne but in his blood he was a king. I also knew a man who was the king of a small kingdom, it was very small and his throne very humble but he and his people were all brave and worthy conquerors. And I knew a man who sat on a magnificent throne of a big and majestic kingdom, but he was not a king at all, he was only a cowardly steward. If you are the king of a great kingdom, you will always be the only king though you live in the bushes. If you are the king of a small kingdom, you can lead your people in worth and honor and together conquer anything. And if you are not a king, though you sit on the king’s throne and drape yourself in many fine robes of silk and velvet, you are still not the king and you will never be one.” - C. JoyBell C.

41. “Michael Ledeen—a contributing editor of National Review and a Freedom Scholar at the influential neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute—wrote on the National Review blog in November 2006: 'I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy'. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.'Ledeen, however, wrote in August 2002 of 'the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein' and when he was interviewed for Front Page Magazine the same month and asked, 'Okay, well if we are all so certain about the dire need to invade Iraq, then when do we do so?' Ledeen replied: 'Yesterday.' There is obvious, substantial risk in falsely claiming that one opposed the Iraq War notwithstanding a public record of support. But that war has come to be viewed as such a profound failure that that risk, at least in the eyes of some, is outweighed by the prospect of being associated with Bush's invasion.” - Glenn Greenwald

42. “Survival feels like cowardice.” - Ann Aguirre

43. “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.” - Henry Rollins

44. “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.” - John Adams

45. “We may place blame, give reasons, and even have excuses; but in the end, it is an act of cowardice to not follow your dreams.” - Steve Maraboli

46. “All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.” - Tim O'Brien

47. “He who has conquered his own coward spirit has conquered the whole outward world;” - Thomas Hughes

48. “-[...] 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

49. “Fear breeds cowardice, and cowardice compels bravery.” - Ogwo David Emenike

50. “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 life and that one day he will have to face his demons in person, along with the consequences, and that both can be far more painful than anything she could ever do to him.” - Donna Lynn Hope

51. “They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;” - Stevenson Robert Louis

52. “It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.” - Chuck Palahniuk