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To talk with, listen to, and consider an enemy is not to demonstrate weakness; it is rather a demonstration of intelligence, pragmatism, and humanity. Anyone with sufficient power can force others into submission, but only those willing and able to seek and recognize truth and to resolve conflict with intelligence, pragmatism, and humanity are truly courageous.
Anyone with a weapon can wield it and anyone with an army can command it, but courage is necessarily personal and any fleeting association with external strength—no matter how powerful that strength or how close that association—will be superficial and immeasurably inferior to an indelible strength of character that fears neither life nor death, outlasting both through courage into legend.
Absolute safety is an illusion; it always has been and it always will be. We can fear danger, we can fight it, we can deny it, and we can even change it by degree, but we can never eliminate it. Never. There will always be things in the universe that are both beyond our control and dangerous to us. It is pointless to fear things that are beyond our control, but it is needless to fear things that are within our control and even the things about which we are uncertain must be one or the other of these, so it would seem then that fear is ultimately either pointless or needless, perhaps motivating us to contemplation or action along the way to either eventuality but then losing its utility. Why then should any of us live in fear of danger and in pursuit of absolute safety that we can never achieve when the mental energies we expend on fear can be better employed truthfully identifying which dangers we can reasonably control, addressing them, and living as well as we can despite any other dangers?
