Umberto Eco Quotes

Some people are cowards... I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they've got to make that choice.

There's no shame in fear. But understand this - the coward is ruled by fear, while the hero rides it like a wild stallion.

A hero is someone who simply got too frightened to use his good sense and run away, then somehow lived through it all.

But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.

I'm a hero wid coward's legs, I'm a hero from the waist up.

They say you never know who's the real hero and who's the real coward until you're looking death in the face. I've always been afraid of plenty of things, but fear isn't what makes you a coward. It's how depraved your heart becomes when fear gets pumped through it.

Cowards suffer, heroes enjoy.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes.

The coward sneaks to death; the brave live on.

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it's be brave or else be killed.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

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.

The difference between a hero and a coward is one step sideways.

I'd like to see one person - just one - who would own up to having been a coward.

As a kid, I wanted to be the person running from the monster. I also wanted to be the person saving people from the monster. I wanted to be a superhero.

I've always been curious about why one man jumps out of a foxhole with a grenade and charges a machine gun nest, and his buddy next to him sits there cowering. And my feeling is that the difference is tiny between the two.

The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.