Courage and Conscience

Martin Luther King once wrote: “Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles; cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances. Courage breeds creative self-affirmation; cowardice produces destructive self-abnegation. Courage faces fear and masters it; cowardice represses fear and is mastered by it. Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it political? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”