Men cling passionately to old traditions and display intense reluctance to modify customary modes of behavior, as innovators at all times have found to their cost. The dead-weight of conservatism, largely a lazy and cowardly distaste for the strenuous and painful activity of real thinking, has undoubtedly retarded human progress..
- V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, p. 31

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
- William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Julius Caesar", Act II Scene 2