Intellectual Cowardice Quotes

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense.

There are men who never err, because they never propose anything rational.

Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.

All the learn'd are cowards by profession.

Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.

Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.

Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.