“I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice.”
John: Act 3, Scene 2.
Days Without End (1933)
Context: I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won't let them face the truth. They don't want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as pig-wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead — and stinking! No, they don't want to be free. Slavery means security — of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not to think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!
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Eugene O'Neill 36
American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature 1888–1953Related quotes
“Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice.”
“Stay focused. Talk about things that’ll matter to the people, you know? It’s the economy, stupid.”
In the 1993 documentary film The War Room.
Nate Thayer interview (1997)
Attributed in George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire.
Attributed
“I find people only listen to you when they ask you to talk to them.”
From 1980s onwards, Only Integrity is Going to Count (1983)
New York Herald Tribune (16 January 1958).