“Saying "yes" for fear of saying "no" is a recipe for resentment.”
Designing Your Own Destiny
Response, refusing instructions by a timid Continental Congress to move war matériel captured from the British to a place of safe keeping until it could be returned; as quoted in "In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!" - American Heritage magazine Vol. 14, Issue 6 (October 1963) http://www.americanheritage.com/content/%E2%80%9C-name-great-jehovah-and-continental-congress%E2%80%9D
“Saying "yes" for fear of saying "no" is a recipe for resentment.”
Designing Your Own Destiny
“Fear lasted a week, anger a year and resentment a lifetime.”
Source: Culture series, Matter (2008), Chapter 17 “Departures” (p. 305)
Context: On this purely practical issue he judged massacre wasteful and even contrary as a method of control.
Speech to the Los Angeles Town Club, Los Angeles, California (11 September 1952); Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952), p. 36
Context: In the tragic days of Mussolini, the trains in Italy ran on time as never before and I am told in their way, their horrible way, that the Nazi concentration-camp system in Germany was a model of horrible efficiency. The really basic thing in government is policy. Bad administration, to be sure, can destroy good policy, but good administration can never save bad policy.
“Fear is the true enemy, the only enemy.”
Attributed implicitly to Sun Tzu by "William Riker" in the episode The Last Outpost of the TV program Star Trek: The Next Generation, but no source for this quote predates the episode's airing in 1987.
Misattributed
“The greatest enemy to fear is truth.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 101
in Public Choice Ignorance Everywhere http://athousandnations.com/2010/11/09/public-choice-ignorance-everywhere/, November 2010