“Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, eh mamma mia?”
If you start an argument with yourself, that makes two people at least, and when you have two people, one of them starts appeasing the other.
"Epistle from Mother Carey's Chicken"
Peter quotes 'Conscience doth make cowards of us all' from the 'To be, or not to be' speech in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1.
Birds of America (1971)
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Mary McCarthy 79
American writer 1912–1989Related quotes

“The Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.”
"A Note on George the Fourth," http://books.google.com/books?id=NA0HAQAAIAAJ&q=%22The+NonConformist+Conscience+makes+cowards+of+us+all%22&pg=PA250#v=onepage The Yellow Book (October 1894)
"King George the Fourth," http://books.google.com/books?id=OvlGAAAAYAAJ&q=%22The+Nonconformist+Conscience+makes+cowards+of+us+all%22&pg=PA63#v=onepage The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896)

Politically Incorrect (17 September 2001); this statement created controversies which resulted in this series being cancelled.

“It's fear that makes us lose our conscience. It's also what transforms us into cowards.”
Source: The Complete Persepolis

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” pp. 271-272
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

Fortune: "Ben Horowitz: There's a fine line between fear and courage" http://fortune.com/2011/08/05/ben-horowitz-theres-a-fine-line-between-fear-and-courage/ (5 August 2011)

“Fatigue makes cowards of all of us.”
War as I knew it (1947), as cited in Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, By Hugh Rawson, Margaret Miner, p. 258 https://books.google.com/books?id=whg05Z4Nwo0C&pg=PA258(via books.google.com).