55 Quotes On Cowardice

Cowardice, often seen as the antithesis of bravery, has been a topic of contemplation and commentary throughout history. It's a trait that, while universally recognized, is understood differently from one person to another. In literature, philosophy, and everyday discourse, cowardice can provide a mirror that reflects our vulnerabilities and challenges us to confront our fears. This collection of 55 quotes delves deep into the essence of cowardice, exploring its impact on human behavior, relationships, and self-perception. As we navigate through these thought-provoking insights, we are invited to reflect on the times we may have faltered and the courage required to overcome such moments. Join us on this introspective journey to understand the nuances of cowardice and what it tells us about the human condition.

1. “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

2. “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” - William Shakespeare

3. “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

4. “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.” - William Francis Butler

5. “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

6. “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 from the North American continent and returned to their native countries.You`d push it, wouldn`t you whitey?See? See? See? in the final analysis, you agree with me.But of course, you wouldn`t do antything to bring that scenario about, or any other scenario favorable to your Race.” - Frazier Glenn Miller

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

8. “If you run from enemy fire, I'll make you wash dishes for the rest of your life!” - Naoki Urasawa

9. “A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide.” - Mickey Mantle

10. “We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility.” - C.S. Lewis

11. “Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

12. “But the only way never to do the wrong thing is never to do anything.” - Jim Butcher

13. “Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.” - George Bernard Shaw

14. “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

15. “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

16. “I think before I act---and then think again. I am not entirely a coward, but I do not lose myself in action as you do.” - John Christopher

17. “Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex...” - Gustave Flaubert

18. “As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.” - Lev Grossman

19. “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind...” - Immanuel Kant

20. “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

21. “Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.” - Ambrose Bierce

22. “He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.” - Gustave Flaubert

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

24. “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

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

26. “Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.” - Thomas Fuller

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

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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “The devil's happy when the critics run you off.” - Criss Jami

32. “It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.” - Chuck Palahniuk

33. “I was a coward. I went to the war.” - Tim O'Brien

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

35. “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

36. “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

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

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

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

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

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

42. “Like all bullies and marauders, Gos was a coward at heart” - L. Frank Baum

43. “Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.” - James Crumley

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. “You can't throw kindling on a fire and deny you kept it burning. And right now, cowardice is that kindling.” - Ilana Waters

46. “There is more to joy than looking only for affirmation; refusing to be challenged is the only bigotry.” - Criss Jami

47. “He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.” - G.K. Chesterton

48. “* *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.” - George Orwell

49. “Life is too short to cower.” - Claire Cross

50. “Don't Shoot! I'm Che. I'm worth more to you alive than dead!” - Ernesto Che Guevara

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

52. “-[...] 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

53. “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

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

55. “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.” - Michel de Montaigne