Quotes about Fear

There is a passion and drive for cruel deeds which only the awe and fear of God can soothe; there is a suffocating selfishness in man which only holiness can ventilate.

One may observe all the laws and still be practicing a disguised polytheism. For if in performing a religious act one's intention is to please a human being whom he fears or from whom he hopes to receive benefit, then it is not God whom he worships but a human being.

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.

If I am killed I can die but once. But to live in constant dread is to die over and over again.

No arguments will give courage to the coward.

No arguments will give courage to the coward.

There are only two kinds of politics. They're not radical and reactionary or conservative and liberal or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men.

If leaders exploit public fears to herd people in directions they might not otherwise choose, then fear itself can quickly become a self-perpetuating and freewheeling force that drains national will and weakens national character, diverting attention from real threats deserving of healthy and appropriate fear and sowing confusion about the essential choices that every nation must constantly make about its future.

The Politics of Fear Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reason are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason. As Edmund Burke wrote in England twenty years before the American Revolution, "No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Nature's kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don't get as scared as we should.

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.