Americans can look to great thinkers for words of comfort during the COVID-19 crisis

Ernest Hemingway noted that the best leaders possess “the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth and the capacity for sacrifice.” His words truly resonate during this moment in time — a moment when we need strong guidance in our country during the coronavirus pandemic.

As a longtime English teacher I have always believed that the words of history’s great authors and thinkers can provide fertile ground for thinking about the current challenges we face. And I certainly believe there are nuggets of wisdom that might provide us with some solace during this fearful time of confronting COVID-19.

For example, American patriot Thomas Paine could have easily been talking about today when he wrote this in 1776: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

And Marie Curie, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, long ago gave us the succinct wisdom of scientists — the very people we rely on now in the battle against COVID-19 — when she wrote: “Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less.”

Meanwhile, Martin Luther King Jr.’s declaration that courage “is the power of the mind to overcome fear” is just as powerful during today’s turmoil as it was when he made that statement decades ago amid America’s civil rights movement.

And we can also look to the words of authors and statesmen as we seek and define the leaders we need for these times.

Chekhov, for example, told us that true leaders “respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable ... They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire.”

The legendary poet Robert Frost noted that there “never was any heart of a leader truly great that was not also tender and compassionate” — while the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson observed that a leader “keeps his fears to himself but shares his courage with others.”

Now if all this advice from literary figures is not enough, you can also find plenty of wisdom in the words of former presidents.

Take, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s assessment that the “opportunist thinks of me and today. The statesman thinks of us and tomorrow.” Or consider Franklin D. Roosevelt’s much-quoted rallying cry that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Our history tells us that America’s genuine greatness comes from our intelligent strength, our open-mindedness, our courage to support those in need and our willingness to protect those around us — and our greatest leaders have upheld these values.

Abraham Lincoln preached that we must “have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

And Thomas Jefferson expressed the view that the “care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”

In this time of a global pandemic, no one could have said it better.

Sherry Beasley is a longtime educator in Columbia.

This story was originally published March 27, 2020 at 4:39 AM.