“Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people – whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver. Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark – and it’s just what they WOULD do.”
– Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 22. Colonel Sherburn talks down the mob who have come to his house to lynch him, branding them cowards. This is a comment on the hypocrisy of the society and human nature.