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1 " Where should one turn for guidance in an appraisal of of the essence of justice, morality, ethics, religion, science, literaturem, and the like? Not to the past, for history is willfully misinterpreted; and not to the church, which is ineffective because of the cowardice of its leaders. Even science cannot be helpful beccause its exponents have succeeded only in destroying the harmony of life. It is therefore the duty of literature to rediscover the truth and beauty of life that other means have failed to find. "
2 " 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. "
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley , Frankenstein: The 1818 Text
3 " 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 , Le Crime des Riches
4 " There's a traditional Kenyan prayer: " From the cowardice that dares not deal with new truth, from the laziness that is content with half-truth, from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Good Lord, deliver me. "
5 " Do not open your minds to the filtering of the fallacious doctrine that it is less infamous to murder men for their politics than for their religion or their money, or that the courage to execute the deed is worse than the cowardice to excuse it. Let us not flinch from condemning without respite or remission, not only Marat and Carrier, but also Barnave. Because there may be hanging matter in the lives of illustrious men, of William the Silent and Farnese, of Cromwell and Napoleon, we are not to be turned from justice towards the actions, and still more the thoughts, of those whom we are about to study. "
― John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton , Lectures on the French Revolution
6 " He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment. "
― Barack Obama
7 " In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves! "
― Marjane Satrapi , Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (Persepolis, #2)
8 " Bravery is the knowledge of the cowardice in the enemy. "
9 " A high heart ought to bear calamities and not flee them since in bearing them appears the grandeur of the mind and in fleeing them the cowardice of the heart. "
10 " If you knew how cowardly your enemy is you would slap him. Bravery is knowledge of the cowardice in the enemy. "
