Pusillanimity Quotes

“Pusillanimity:
.
Such small doors in such tall houses!
Do Men live here or Pygmies?”
― Vijay Fafat, The Ninth Pawn of White - A Book of Unwritten Verses

“While Milke gingerly carried the packet of explosive across the lake, Paskell stood by the port watching. Milke surveyed the landscape with fine calculation, setting down the packet, moving it a few yards to the right, another few yards toward the defile. Finally satisfied, he looked back to Paskell for approval. Paskell signaled casually, and his hand fell against the detonation switch. He looked out toward Milke, hastily jumped into his [pressure] suit, let himself through the port, ran across the lake.
Milke asked, "What's the trouble?"
Paskell said, "That remote detonator doesn't work. I'd better take a look at it."
Milke stared at him truculently. "How do you know it doesn't work?"
Paskell made a vague gesture, knelt beside the packet, unfolded the wrapping.
"You couldn't have just sensed it," Milke insisted.
"Well, as a matter of fact, my hand accidentally hit the switch, and it didn't go off—so I though I'd better run out and see what was wrong."
Milke seemed to sink in his suit. For a moment there was silence. "Ah," said Paskell. "Nothing very serious; I neglected to clip down the battery leads . . . .now it's ready to go—"
"I'm going back to the ship," said Milke thickly.”
― Jack Vance, The Augmented Agent and Other Stories

“[I]n around AD 170, a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental and vitriolic attack against the religion. It is clear that, unlike the other authors who have so far written about it, Celsus knows a lot about it. He has read Christian scripture – and not just read it: studied it in great detail. He knows about everything – from the Creation, to the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the Resurrection. It is equally clear that he loathes it all and in arch, sardonic, and occasionally very earthy sentences, he vigorously rebuts it. The Virgin Birth? Nonsense, he writes, a Roman soldier had got Mary pregnant. The Creation is ‘absurd’; the books of Moses are garbage; while the idea of the resurrection of the body is ‘revolting’ and, on a practical level, ridiculous: ‘simply the hope of worms. For what sort of human soul would have any further desire for a body that has rotted?’
What is also clear is that Celsus is more than just disdainful. He is worried. Pervading his writing is a clear anxiety that this religion – a religion that he considers stupid, pernicious and vulgar – might spread even further and, in so doing, damage Rome. Over 1,500 years later, the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians. The Christians’ belief in their forthcoming heavenly realm made them dangerously indifferent to the needs of their earthly one. Christians shirked military service, the clergy actively preached pusillanimity, and vast amounts of public money were spent not on protecting armies but squandered instead on the ‘useless multitudes’ of the Church’s monks and nuns. They showed, Gibbon felt, an ‘indolent, or even criminal, disregard for the public welfare’.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“… You do not know much about the art of compromise, perhaps, but I do. Indeed I do. The Senate is the finest training ground for the art. You thunder no, and you murmur yes. Everyone saves face, always, everyone obtains a little of what he wants, alway. Compromise is the very soul of statemanship. The one time it failed in America we had a civil war, and the fault, in my judgment, lay squarely in the lack of a compromiser in the South, for the North had one of the greatest compromisers in our history: Mr. Lincoln.”
― Carl Marzani, The Survivor