“Saying "yes" for fear of saying "no" is a recipe for resentment.”
Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician
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.”
Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician
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.
Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
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.”
Sun Tzu (-543–-495 BC) ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty
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
Robert A. Hall (1946) American politician
I'm Tired (February 19, 2009)
Dave Ramsey (1960) American financial advisor
“The greatest enemy to fear is truth.”
Steve Maraboli (1975)
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 101
Patri Friedman (1976) American libertarian activist and theorist of political economy
in Public Choice Ignorance Everywhere http://athousandnations.com/2010/11/09/public-choice-ignorance-everywhere/, November 2010