Top 100 Cowardly Quotes
#1. We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly.
Jean De La Bruyere
#2. 'Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.'
Matthew Pearl
#3. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer.
George Orwell
#4. Because our lives are cowardly and sly, Because we do not dare to take or give, Because we scowl and pass each other by, We do not live; we do not dare to live.
James Stephens
#5. One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
C.S. Lewis
#6. To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.
Thomas Carlyle
#7. I admire a person who, for the love of art, is able to take off their clothes in front of a camera. But I'm not capable, I'm too cowardly for that.
Shakira
#8. The Manifesto was a cowardly proceeding, the more I thought of it the less I liked it.
B. H. Roberts
#9. The world has no reason for fighting in our defense, and as a matter of principle God does not make cowardly nations free ...
Adolf Hitler
#10. I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more willfully obstinate.
Michel De Montaigne
#11. The form of government, when it has been prudently established, produces citizens distinguished for bravery, justice, and every other good quality; whereas, on the other hand, bad institutions render men cowardly, rapacious, and slaves of every foul desire.
Dionysius Of Halicarnassus
#12. A cowardly populace which will dare nothing beyond talk.
[Lat., Vulgus ignavum et nihil ultra verba ausurum.]
Tacitus
#13. I made it to Boxing Day because I was too miserable to hang myself. I lie. I made it to Boxing Day because I was too cowardly to hang myself.
David Mitchell
#14. It is just as cowardly to judge an absent person as it is wicked to strike a defenseless one. Only the ignorant and narrow-minded gossip, for they speak of persons instead of things.
Lawrence G. Lovasik
#15. To believe a business impossible is the way to make it so. How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.
Jeremy Collier
#16. justified in the name of "security" like almost every cowardly idiocy before and since,
Christopher Hitchens
#17. All this we see, and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old formula, Respect the law, we say, Despise law and all its Attributes! In place of the cowardly phrase, Obey the law, our cry, is Revolt against all laws!
Peter Kropotkin
#18. The host thus forming a single united body, is it impossible either for the brave to advance alone, or for the cowardly to retreat alone
Sun Tzu
#19. But just because it's cowardly doesn't guarantee it's going to be easy.
Jasmine Warga
#20. If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
Oscar Wilde
#21. I never figured it was a cowardly thing to be scared. It's to be scared and still face up to what scares you that matters.
Louis L'Amour
#22. Coincidences are the explanations of lazy and cowardly people for what they don't understand.
Patricia Nedelea
#23. War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
Thomas Carlyle
#24. I like women who are so real that they become as cowardly as certain men, as heroic as others and as sexual and dominating as men can be. And as you can imagine everything I do is [misunderstood].
Danielle Arbid
#25. I hated myself, and the part of me that was cowardly wished for a simple solution: an exchange of pain for forgiveness. But life didn't work that way, and fucking up was forever.
Alexis Hall
#26. I decline Christianity because it is Jewish, because it is international, and because, in cowardly fashion, it preaches Peace on Earth.
Erich Ludendorff
#27. The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to collectivists, to people who believe that wealth is best obtained by redistribution, and that message is clear and concise ... Egalitarianism is sinful; it's also cowardly.
P. J. O'Rourke
#28. He had never felt so ashamed in his life; he had never imagined that he could behave so cruelly. He wondered how a boy who thought he was a good person really could act in such a cowardly way towards a friend.
John Boyne
#29. Love transforms our fragile, cowardly hearts into hearts of stone, hearts of blade, hearts of hardest iron. Because love makes heroes of us all.
Kelly Barnhill
#30. No one but yourself knows whether you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devout; others do not see you; they surmise you by uncertain conjectures; they perceive not so much your nature as your art.
Michel De Montaigne
#31. When I left SNL, I gave Seth a badge of courage, like Dorothy give to the Cowardly Lion ... He kept it in his pocket during "Update" until he didn't need it anymore. Now it sits in a box on his desk at Late Night.
Amy Poehler
#33. It is wicked to withdraw from being useful to the needy, and cowardly to give way to the worthless.
Epictetus
#34. Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
#35. True power wasn't convincing a cowardly lot to be afraid of something that people were already afraid of; it was giving them a complex that made them run screaming when a fluffy kitten came bounding into the room.
Seanan McGuire
#36. Ahimsa is the highest ideal. It is meant for the brave, never for the cowardly.
Mahatma Gandhi
#37. It is not cowardly, quite the contrary, to seek to meet the adversary and know his intentions. However, it is cowardly, shameful and treasonable to lay down arms.
King Hassan II
#38. Lots of people think that bisexual means cowardly lesbian.
Sandra Bernhard
#39. Let there be no hesitations, no regrets, no compromises - they are at once cowardly and vain.
Nikki Gemmell
#40. I am openly prideful, secretly judgemental, and cowardly in conflict.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#41. The malignity that never forgets or forgives is found only in base and ignoble natures, whose aims are selfish, and whose means are indirect, cowardly, and treacherous.
George Stillman Hillard
#42. I look forward to a future of boredom and suffering, since I'm too cowardly to put an end to my days. I'll just go on: clubbing, snorting, drinking and persecuting the fools of the world.
Lolita Pille
#43. It's evident to anyone paying attention that zero tolerance equals 100 percent stupidity. But you have to understand that zero-tolerance rules aren't about protecting kids. They exist to protect the adults who are too cowardly to make judgments.
Jonathan V. Last
#44. Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds
a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents
Albert Camus
#45. America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.
James A. Michener
#46. Apropos this election season, America is the home of:
"Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; and cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers.
Charles Dickens
#47. I sometimes think I prefer suitors in books rather than right in front of me. How awful, backward, cowardly, and mentally warped that will be if it turns out to be true.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#48. The problem is, we have too many cowardly, spineless, selfish people that would sacrifice their children's future just to avoid the sacrifice love requires of them in the present. And they expect their children to respect them for that? Do they think we're idiots just because we're young?
Darryl Steven Markowitz
#49. It takes physical courage to indulge in wickedness. The "good" are too cowardly to do it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#50. We all have a monster somewhere inside us," Charlotte said. "Like I was saying about the kids. Sometimes it's aggressive, sometimes it finds other forms of attack, and other times it's a cowardly one.
Wildbow
#51. There is nothing like a conflict to do the difficult work for you. It is an underrated remedy, cowardly as we are, but it makes everything so much easier.
Jens Christian Grondahl
#52. Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.
Simon Pegg
#53. No one is so cowardly that Love could not inspire him to heroism.
Plato
#54. Those who committed these cowardly acts may believe that they have shaken our resolve to defeat terrorism. They could not be more wrong.
Doc Hastings
#55. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now
Virginia Woolf
#56. Woman and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are in danger.
Jean Paul
#57. Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.
Mary McCarthy
#58. Ah, ah, no buts. You've just returned to us and it is too soon to express whatever doubts you undoubtedly have with that most cowardly of words, that qualifier of qualifiers, but.
Frank Beddor
#59. Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.
Robert M. La Follette
#60. Truth without love is imperious self-righteousn ess. Love without truth is cowardly self-indulgence .
Timothy Keller
#62. A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.
Mark Twain
#63. 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
#64. Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try.
in Good Housekeeping
Peggy Noonan
#65. If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.
Hassan Nasrallah
#66. Well, all right. Something in what you say, I suppose. Consider you treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard, but have booked Spink-Bottle. Stay where you are, then, and I hope you get run over by an omnibus. Love. Travers
P.G. Wodehouse
#67. There is a killer in every cowardly man, waiting for the right set of circumstances when the time has been drained of the possibility of reprisals and he feels free to act.
M.D. Lachlan
#68. Timid and cowardly soldiers cause the loss of a nation's independence; but pusillanimous magistrates destroy the empire of the laws, the rights of the throne, and even social order itself.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#69. This is what e-mail is: either a cowardly way for people to ask favors of you that they would never ask in person, or a way for people to pretend they are having a friendship with you when they really are not.
Dean Bakopoulos
#70. The most seditious is the most cowardly.
Tacitus
#71. In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.
Stanley Fish
#72. There is a cowardly propensity in the human heart that delights in oppressing somebody else, and in the gratification of this base desire we always select a victim that can be outraged with safety.
James T. Rapier
#74. It's too cowardly, and besides, I don't have the courage. [on why he hadn't killed himself yet]
Nick Drake
#75. We must be neither cowardly nor rash but courageous.
Aristotle.
#76. But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us ... and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us.
William T. Vollmann
#77. Cynicism is overrated, and far too easy. In small doses, cynicism
like irony
provides an essential tempering quality. But to wallow in it, and to dismiss things like hope and faith, is cowardly and unoriginal.
Michael Perry
#78. If I was brave, and I was, then that was what had to be done. Toying with any other options was cowardly shit, and I didn't do cowardly. Not any more. Decision made.
C.D. Reiss
#79. To retaliate against the relatives of the co-religionists of the wrong-doer is a cowardly act.
Mahatma Gandhi
#80. We should never so entirely avoid danger as to appear irresolute and cowardly; but, at the same time, we should avoid unnecessarily exposing ourselves to danger, than which nothing can be more foolish.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#81. One life would not suffice, mine especially. To touch everything and leave nothing after oneself! Ah! my God! I hope better than that. Ah! I am very cowardly, and under the blow of such a terror I am ready to believe in priests.
Marie Bashkirtseff
#82. I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work. I love to write.
David Mamet
#83. All this had already given us an inkling of what the new regime was about. There was still some hope, however. There is always some hope, especially for cowards. I was one of them, one of those cowardly or hopeful young men who still thought the government had something to offer.
Reinaldo Arenas
#84. The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.
Alan Watts
#85. We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly.
Bill Maher
#86. Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.
Sherman Alexie
#87. When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
Salman Rushdie
#88. Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.
Terry Pratchett
#89. It is impossible to fully comprehend the evil that would have conjured up such a cowardly and depraved assault upon thousands of innocent people.
Jean Chretien
#90. One of the chief misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowardly.
Voltaire
#91. And here we have six missing Death Eaters ... three dead in my service. One, too cowardly to return ... he will pay. One, who I believe has left me for ever ... he will be killed, of course ... and one who remains my most faithful servant, and who has already re-entered my service.
J.K. Rowling
#92. Esther was more man than most men I know, myself included. Many of us - men and women - are extremely passive and cowardly. We don't take risks for God because we are obsessed with safety, security, and most of all, with the future.
Kevin DeYoung
#94. It is cowardly to commit suicide. The English often kill themselves. It is a malady caused by the humid climate.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#95. He who turns the other cheek is a cowardly dog
a Christian dog.
Ragnar Redbeard
#96. An odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries.
Javier Marias
#97. I don't know" means "NO!"
"I don't know" means "I'm too cowardly to tell you the truth because I can't deal with confrontation."
"I don't know" means please do the dirty work for me because I don't want to hurt your feelings even more then I already have.
Greg Behrendt
#98. Do you think Oz could give me courage? asked the Cowardly Lion.
L. Frank Baum
#99. I have personal experience, you might say. I know how one cowardly decision leads to another . . . and another . . . and another . . . until it's too late to turn around, too late to change. Mr.
Stephen King
#100. Despondency is not a state of humility; on the contrary, it is the vexation and despair of a cowardly pride
nothing is worse; whether we fall, we must only think of rising again and going on course.
Francois Fenelon
