Mark Lawrence Quotes
Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.
Lawrence, Mark. Prince of Thorns. Ace Books, 2011.
The fear of nuclear war was a major emotion for most people in the world at the time. Hard liners like Goldwater were concerned that that fear would undermine support for greater nuclear development and deployment in America and maintaining opposition to nuclear test ban treaties that were under discussion. He made the mistake however of referring to the fear as “craven”, morally denigrating any American who might be in fear of nuclear war, which included just about everyone. So the Democrats took this quotation and used it in their battery of TV ads showing Goldwater as not only a hard liner, but one who had no empathy or understanding for a normal person who feared a nuclear conflict—one who was not to be trusted with the Presidency. Had Goldwater simply argued that legitimate and reasonable fear of nuclear conflict might make the nation too timid and perhaps inadvertently increase the likelihood of nuclear disaster by not standing up to the Russians, he may not have had the resentment from most people who thought Goldwater was calling their fears “craven”.
Mark Lawrence (born 1966) is an American-British novelist who wrote The Broken Empire trilogy of fantasy books. In 2014, Lawrence won the David Gemmell Legend Awards for best novel for Emperor of Thorns. He operates the annual Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off.
