Courage is the middle way between cowardice (deficiency) and recklessness (excess).

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.” E.F. Schumacher

Novelists Ernest Hemingway and Wil-liam Faulkner, for example, went backand forth about the virtues of simplic-ity in writing. Faulkner once criticizedHemingway, who he said “had nocourage, never been known to use aword that might send the reader to thedictionary.” “Poor Faulkner,” Heming-way responded, “Does he really thinkbig emotions come from big words?He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollarwords. I know them all right. But thereare older and simpler and better words,and those are the ones I use.”15

Don't give up 'cause you have friends

Exhaustion is not evidence of a lack of courage but of its abundance. To deny the struggle is to deny the very thing that allows us to triumph in the end.

“Courage is a measure of our heartfelt participation with life.” The depth of my heartbreak is not just evidence of my failure. It is evidence of my courage, of the lengths I was willing to go to participate fully and completely in my pursuit of this goal.

Perhaps for everyone, a moment or occasion of leadership will emerge, reveal itself, and call to us with the painful, necessary task of speaking up, patiently asking for alternatives, insistently rocking the boat

Both terms refer to the Germanword Zivilcourage.1Moral courage is a prosocial behavior with high social costsand no (or rare) direct rewards for the actor

So I respond by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have stood up for the rights of unpopular victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing: (1) that it would make them unpopular with their peers, (2) that they would be loathed and ridiculed by powerful, influential individuals and institutions in our society; (3) that they would be abandoned by many of their friends, (4) that they would be called nasty names, and (5) that they would risk being denied valuable professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness. In short, my challenge is to show where they have at risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today.”

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”