“Weakness always has a thousand means and cowardice is all that keeps us from listing them.”

— Aimé Césaire , Une Tempête

Caliban in Une Tempête (1969)
Une Tempête (1969)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 30, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Weakness always has a thousand means and cowardice is all that keeps us from listing them." by Aimé Césaire?

Aimé Césaire 10

Martiniquais politician 1913–2008

Related quotes

“We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)

“Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

“But history has shown again and again that the weak of the present have become the strong of the future, whereas power of today has provided the ruins of tomorrow. Who can know today that attributes and capacities will be vital in a thousand years' time? Only the preservation of all our attributes, including our weaknesses, can carry us safely through into the uncertain future.”

Henno Martin (1910–1998) German geologist

(p. 221)
Sheltering Desert; Union Deutsche Verlangsgesellschaft Ulm (1958)
Context: All power operates on a narrow basis; it rests on a few chosen faculties, and always ruthlessly exploits the weak. But history has shown again and again that the weak of the present have become the strong of the future, whereas power of today has provided the ruins of tomorrow. Who can know today that attributes and capacities will be vital in a thousand years' time? Only the preservation of all our attributes, including our weaknesses, can carry us safely through into the uncertain future. But how can it be done? Certainly not by force which does not preserve but destroys. There is only one thing which preserves all things, including the weak, and that is love.

“What is it that has made of us in Germany the pivotal part? … It is the avalanche-like increase of our supporters that gradually, with the certainty of a natural law, or more correctly of a natural force, grows from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, and from hundreds of thousands to millions, and is daily increasing, bidding defiance to our opponents and driving them into impotent rage. And this avalanche-like increase has come, and is coming, as a consequence of our opposition to and struggle with all other parties.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“When we understand that privileged people derive material benefits from the exploitation of oppressed people, and that this means we benefit from the violence used to keep them down, we cannot sincerely condemn them for violently rebelling against the structural violence that privileges us.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 37.