"For all men would be cowards if they durst"

A sharpened paradox from Rochester’s A Satire Against Mankind, the line suggests that fear is the deepest human constant, and that most displays of valor are masks fashioned by a stronger fear: the dread of shame. People do not brave danger because they have conquered fear; they brave it because they fear disgrace, exclusion, or ridicule even more. If they dared to acknowledge fear honestly, if they durst, they would choose safety, retreat, and life.

The wit lies in the inversion: cowardice, so stigmatized, would itself require a kind of courage. To resist the herd’s demand for bravado, to admit one’s vulnerability in a culture that deifies honor, is a defiance rarer than the duel. Rochester is needling a code of honor that turns self-preservation into a vice and social compliance into heroism. The soldier who charges may be animated less by devotion than by terror of being called a coward; the courtier who postures boldly is protecting a reputation rather than a principle.

The observation harmonizes with a Hobbesian view of human nature that Rochester elsewhere embraces: self-preservation is primary, reason serves the passions, and society manages us by manipulating our fears. Public courage becomes a choreography of shame-aversion. Thus many celebrated deeds are not proofs of inner fortitude but proofs of our susceptibility to collective judgment.

Read broadly, the line also unmasks forms of moral and civic behavior today. Online belligerence, performative certainty, and risk-taking in boardrooms or politics often spring from anxiety about seeming weak. Conversely, the refusal to join fashionable outrage, the willingness to say “I’m afraid” or “I don’t know,” can be the rarer bravery.

What remains is a call to intellectual honesty. Recognize fear as universal, scrutinize the social mechanisms that redirect it, and seek a quieter courage: the freedom to choose life over ceremony, candor over swagger, integrity over applause.