Courage and cowardice - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help - may even be hindrances - to a civilized man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place.

- H. G.Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention (1895)

He was not, as he knew well from experience, one of those persons who love danger for its own sake. There was an aspect of it which he sometimes enjoyed, an excitement, a purgative effect upon sluggish emotions, but he was far from fond of risking his life.

- James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933)

Cowardly Lion: Courage! What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ''ape'' in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got? All: Courage! Cowardly Lion: You can say that again! Huh?

- Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar AllanWoolf, TheWizard of Oz (film, 1939)

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.

- C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

We have a tradition of freedom, personal freedom, scientific freedom. That freedom isn't kept alive by caution and unwillingness to take risks.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten.We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (1955)

If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgment.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham's Freehold (1964)

There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1972)

Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.

- Poul Anderson, ''The Saturn Game'' (1981)

Almost everything about a human creature is ridiculous, except its ability to suffer bravely and die gallantly for whatever it loves and believes in.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984)

Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work.

- Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (1986)

Cowardice, properly judged, may be a survival trait.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)