Skip to content

Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you.
Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.

— Thomas Szasz The Second Sin (1973)

Another quote →

Topics

Courage

More quotes by Thomas Szasz

The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.

The Second Sin (1973)

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

The Second Sin (1973)

In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.

The Manufacture of Madness (1970)

Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.

The Second Sin (1973)

The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.

Anti-Freud (1990)

All Thomas Szasz quotes →

You may also like

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar (1599)

All doubt is cowardice — all trust is brave.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Courage is never born with a person; time and circumstances inject it into a person and bring it forth from within.

Sanu Sharma

Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.

Bertrand Russell Education and the Social Order (1932)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Szasz (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.