“The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps”
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James Gilligan 1
American psychiatrist and authorRelated quotes
“The most dangerous kind of person… is one who is afraid of his own shadow.”
Source: A Scanner Darkly
“Men see what they are most afraid of.”
Source: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974), Chapter 4, p. 94.
Spoken by Daniel Hannan on Judge Andrew Napolitano's online streaming FOX News program, Freedom Watch (29 April 2009)
2000s
Quoted in Supreme Command : Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (2002) by Eliot A. Cohen, p. 172
Address at the National Archives dedicating a shrine for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (15 December 1952) https://trumanlibrary.org/calendar/viewpapers.php?pid=2102
Context: Of course, there are dangers in religious freedom and freedom of opinion. But to deny these rights is worse than dangerous, it is absolutely fatal to liberty. The external threat to liberty should not drive us into suppressing liberty at home. Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.
All freedom-loving nations, not the United States alone, are facing a stern challenge from the Communist tyranny. In the circumstances, alarm is justified. The man who isn't alarmed simply doesn't understand the situation — or he is crazy. But alarm is one thing, and hysteria is another. Hysteria impels people to destroy the very thing they are struggling to preserve.
Invasion and conquest by Communist armies would be a horror beyond our capacity to imagine. But invasion and conquest by Communist ideas of right and wrong would be just as bad.
For us to embrace the methods and morals of communism in order to defeat Communist aggression would be a moral disaster worse than any physical catastrophe. If that should come to pass, then the Constitution and the Declaration would be utterly dead and what we are doing today would be the gloomiest burial in the history of the world.
Source: The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962), Chapter 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics, § 10 : The Concept of a Perfect System of Government
Context: It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence. The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
“Most men are rather stupid, and most of those who are not stupid are, consequently, rather vain.”
"The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism", a lecture delivered on August 4, 1921