Selected fear quotes

1. Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

2. And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

3. We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.

4. Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.

5. Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.

6. Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.

7. We're frightened of what makes us different.

8. He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.

9. Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

10. The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

11. To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.

12. When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.

13. It's sometimes easier to do the impossible than to do the embarrassing.

14. The things I fear may all be imaginary, so what I fear most is my imagination.

15. I can face anything, except the future, and certain parts of the past and present.

16. One problem I have definitely solved is the problem of not having enough to worry about.

17. Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back.

18. Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

19. Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

20. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

21. The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

22. Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavour after a worthy manner of life.

23. Britney: My love doesn't scare me. Other people's love scares me.

24. So for you people who are filled with fear that I might someday be released: breathe easy, I don't see it happening.

25. Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.

26. The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.

27. I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.

28. The monsters act out our rage. They act on their worst impulses, which is appealing to a certain part of us. They get punished for it, but we've enjoyed the spectacle of their liberation.

29. At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.

30. Here is a list of fearful things: The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings, The rabid bite of the dog's of war, The voice of one who went before. But most of all the mirror's gaze, which counts us out our numbered days.

31. As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula.

32. If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

33. The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.

34. The ability of a country to wage war is not an accurate measure of its strengths, but of its fears.

35. That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

36. There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

37. Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

38. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

39. The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.

40. No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

41. We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear - fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.

42. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said to myself softly the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

43. Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

44. Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence. (London, 1962).

45. The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes - and we must.

46. Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about. Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being. This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

47. I have dreams, and I have nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.

48. Facing it - always facing it - that's the way to get through.

49. The injustice done to an individual is sometimes of service to the public. Facts are apt to alarm us more than the most dangerous principles.

50. Moving stranger, Does it really matter, As long as you're not afraid to feel?

51. He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out: A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care any more about anything but himself and his dying.

52. People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is a bliss when the knowledge is so damn frightening.

53. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.

54. The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

55. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real.

56. Tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

57. Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.

58. Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.

59. The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as 'Communists' or 'Fascists' by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.

60. No matter what these terrorists do, I refuse to be terrorized. ...All this requires is just a few alterations in our day to day lives. For example, my first instinct when I receive an envelope full of white powder... is to snort it! I just won't do that this time!

61. People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture ... We are not in politics to ignore peoples' worries: we are in politics to deal with them.

62. And when he came to the place where the wild things are, they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till Max said, 'Be still' and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once. And they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things.

63. I wanted my wild things to be frightening. But why? It was probably at this point that I remembered how I detested my Brooklyn relatives as a small child. They came almost every Sunday, and there was my week-long anxiety about their coming the next Sunday... They'd lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses, and say something threatening like 'You're so cute I could eat you up.' And I knew if my mother didn't hurry up with the cooking, they probably would.

64. Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

65. Sometimes I wave to people I don't know. It's very dangerous to wave to someone you don't know because what if they don't have a hand? They'll think you're cocky. 'Look what I got motherfucker! This thing is useful. I'm gonna go pick something up!'

66. It's lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself.

67. The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

68. All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen. [citation needed]

69. Never acknowledge the limitations of man. Smash all boundaries! Deny whatever your eyes see. Die every moment, but say: 'Death does not exist.'

70. Nothing exists! Neither life nor death. I watch mind and matter hunting each other like two nonexistent erotic phantasms - merging, begetting, disappearing - and I say: 'This is what I want!' I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

71. But the fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.

72. Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone? Tell me, who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?

73. Swiftly walk over the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, - Swift be thy flight!

74. Jesus Christ opposed with earnest eloquence the panic fears and hateful superstitions which have enslaved mankind for ages. Nations had risen against nations, employing the subtlest devices of mechanism and mind to waste, and excruciate, and overthrow. The great community of mankind had been subdivided into ten thousand communities, each organized for the ruin of the other. Wheel within wheel, the vast machine was instinct with the restless spirit of desolation.

75. The key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.

76. I am so afraid of people's words. They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That's how you kill.

77. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, - 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'

78. My valor is certainly going!-it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out, as it were, at the palm of my hands!

79. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which , in fact, never existed. (6-8-64)

80. In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on his own at an earlier age and for a longer period.

81. :are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the 'divine madness' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

82. Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one an temporarily evade reality ... but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

83. Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial-at once full of hope and full of fear-of the vastitude of human ignorance.[2]

84. The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.

85. Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

86. When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.

87. The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it. [p.260]

88. The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown . . . and no one knows whether death which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. . . .

89. Not living in fear is a great gift, because certainly these days we do it so much. And do you know what I like about comedy? You can't laugh and be afraid at the same time-of anything. If you're laughing, I defy you to be afraid.

90. Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is unrighteousness, fear is wrong life. All the negative thoughts and ideas that are in the world have proceeded from this evil spirit of fear.

91. Still as they run they look behind, They hear a voice in every wind, And snatch a fearful joy.

92. And there is ev'n a happiness That makes the heart afraid!

93. A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall soon it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

94. 'I don't trust or love anyone. Because people are all creepy. Creepy creepy creeps. Creeping around. Creeping here and creeping there. Creeping everywhere. Crippity crappity creepies.'

95. The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour.)

96. A living creature develops a destructive impulse when it wants to destroy a source of danger. In this case, the destruction or killing of the object is the biologically purposeful goal. The original motive is not pleasure in destruction. Rather the destruction serves the 'life instinct'...and is an attempt to avoid anxiety and to preserve the ego in its totality. I destroy in a dangerous situation because I want to live and do not want to have any anxiety. In short, the impulse to destroy serves a primary biological will to live...

97. Sexual anxiety is caused by the external frustration of instinctual gratification and is internally anchored by the fear of the dammed-up sexual excitation. This leads to orgasm anxiety, which is the ego's fear of the over-powering excitation of the genital system due to its estrangement from the experience of pleasure. Orgasm anxiety constitutes the core of the universal, biologically anchored pleasure anxiety. It is usually expressed as a general anxiety about every form of vegetative sensation and excitation, or the perception of such excitation and sensations. The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.

98. Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

99. Like a fiend in a cloud, With howling woe, After night I do crowd, And with night will go; I turn my back to the east, From whence comforts have increased; For light doth seize my brain With frantic pain.

100. My mother groan'd! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud: Like a fiend hid in a cloud.