Quotes about fear
page 29

Antonio Llidó photo
William Makepeace Thackeray photo

“Christmas is here:
Winds whistle shrill,
Icy and chill.
Little care we;
Little we fear
Weather without,
Sheltered about
The Mahogany Tree.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

The Mahogany Tree, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Robert Southey photo

“All of us fight a battle every day, but we just don’t know it. Love tries to defeat hatred. Bravery destroys fear.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005-2009), The Traveler (2005)

Masaru Ibuka photo

“We worked furiously (to realise our goals). Because we didn't have fear, we could do something drastic.”

Masaru Ibuka (1908–1997) Japanese businessman

Masaru Ibuka cited in: Ashley Goldsworthy (2009), Leadership in Action. p. 52

Francis Escudero photo
Baruch Ashlag photo
George Dantzig photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Judge John Tyler http://www.constitution.org/tj/jeff11.txt (June 28, 1804); in: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition (ME) (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 11, page 33
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

Rosie O'Donnell photo

“Get away from the fear. Don't fear the terrorists. They're mothers and fathers.”

Rosie O'Donnell (1962) American comedienne, television personality and actress

The View, Nov. 9, 2006 (quoted by ABC http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3003155)

Emil M. Cioran photo
George MacDonald photo

“The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,
In that fear doubteth thee.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Disciple
The Disciple and Other Poems (1867)

William H. Prescott photo
Oliver Lodge photo

“Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is. We change our state at birth, and come into the world of air and sense and myriad existence; we change our state at death and enter a region of—what?”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, p. 298 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=340
Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

“If we can just be brave enough to be each others mirror, we may finally recognize the face of conscious that we fear.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Why Are The Drums So Silent"
Sunshine, Dust and The Messenger (2002)

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo
Kamisese Mara photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood photo
Richard Nixon photo
André Breton photo

“It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Patrice O'Neal photo
William Saroyan photo

“It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Letter to Robert E. Sherwood (1946)

Ernest Dimnet photo
Melanie Joy photo
Sam Harris photo

“We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

[Sam Harris, 10 October 2005, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/bombing-our-illusions_b_8615.html, "Bombing Our Illusions", The Huffington Post, 2006-10-16]
2000s

Robert Mugabe photo

“Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy!”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

"Whites are real enemy, warns Mugabe", Irish Times, 15 December 2000, p. 11.
Speech to ZANU-PF congress, Harare, 14 December 2000.
2000s, 2000-2004

John Buchan photo
Theodor Mommsen photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Milton Friedman photo
Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear.”

L'amour aussi bien que le feu ne peut subsister sans un mouvement continuel; et il cesse de vivre dès qu'il cesse d'espérer ou de craindre.
Maxim 75.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

“What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?”

Michael Bishop (1945) American writer

Source: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), Chapter 1, “Planetfall: The Hawks of Conscience” (p. 33)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Ludwig Tieck photo

“True love fears no winter.
No, no!
Its spring is and ever remains.”

Die Liebe wintert nicht;
Nein! nein!
Ist und bleibt Fruhlingesschein.
"Herbstlied", line 22, from Friedrich Schiller (ed.), Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1799 (1798); translation from W. B. T., Every Morning (London: William Tegg, 1874), p. 71.

Henry Van Dyke photo
John Buchan photo

“Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 117
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

Lester B. Pearson photo
Henry Ward Beecher photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Colette Dowling photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Pablo Neruda photo

“Later on you will find buried near the coconut tree
the knife which I hid there for fear you would kill me,
and now suddenly I would be glad to smell its kitchen steel
used to the weight of your hand, the shine of your foot:
under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots,
in all the languages of the men only the poor will know your name,
and the dense earth does not understand your name
made of impenetrable divine substances.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Enterrado junto al cocotero hallarás más tarde
el cuchillo que escodí allí por temor de que me mataras,
y ahora repentinamente quisiera oler su acero de cocina
acostumbrado al peso de tu mano y al brillo de tu pie:
bajo la humedad de la tierra, entre las sordas raíces,
de los lenguajes humanos el pobre sólo sabría tu nombre,
y la espesa tierra no comprende tu nombre
hecho de impenetrables y substancias divinas.
Tango del Viudo (The Widower's Tango), Residencia I (Residence I), III, stanza 3.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
Buried next to the coconut tree you will later find
the knife that I hid there for fear that you would kill me,
and now suddenly I should like to smell its kitchen steel
accustomed to the weight of your hand and the shine of your foot:
under the moisture of the earth, among the deaf roots,
of all human labguages the poor thing would know only your name,
and the thick earth does not understand your name
made of impenetrable and divine substances.
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)

“Rumor, I fear, is scarcely as accurate as he is rapid.”

Source: The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969), Chapter 9

David Cameron photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“In England, where judges were named and removable at the will of an hereditary executive, from which branch most misrule was feared, and has flowed, it was a great point gained, by fixing them for life, to make them independent of that executive. But in a government founded on the public will, this principle operates in an opposite direction, and against that will. There, too, they were still removable on a concurrence of the executive and legislative branches. But we have made them independent of the nation itself. They are irremovable, but by their own body, for any depravities of conduct, and even by their own body for the imbecilities of dotage. The justices of the inferior courts are self- chosen, are for life, and perpetuate their own body in succession forever, so that a faction once possessing themselves of the bench of a county, can never be broken up, but hold their county in chains, forever indissoluble. Yet these justices are the real executive as well as judiciary, in all our minor and most ordinary concerns. They tax us at will; fill the office of sheriff, the most important of all the executive officers of the county; name nearly all our military leaders, which leaders, once named, are removable but by themselves. The juries, our judges of all fact, and of law when they choose it, are not selected by the people, nor amenable to them. They are chosen by an officer named by the court and executive. Chosen, did I say? Picked up by the sheriff from the loungings of the court yard, after everything respectable has retired from it. Where then is our republicanism to be found? Not in our constitution certainly, but merely in the spirit of our people. That would oblige even a despot to govern us republicanly. Owing to this spirit, and to nothing in the form of our constitution, all things have gone well. But this fact, so triumphantly misquoted by the enemies of reformation, is not the fruit of our constitution, but has prevailed in spite of it. Our functionaries have done well, because generally honest men. If any were not so, they feared to show it.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)

Randolph Bourne photo
Diogenes Laërtius photo

“Asked what he gained from philosophy, he answered, "To do without being commanded what others do from fear of the laws."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Aristotle, 9.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 5: The Peripatetics

Charles Churchill (satirist) photo

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive.
An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

“I fear that by gaining a limit, we'll lose an excuse.”

Romeo LeBlanc (1927–2009) Canadian politician

Source: Speech as Fisheries Minister, at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, September 16, 1975, well in advance of Canada declaring 200-mile fisheries jurisdiction in 1977.

Brené Brown photo

“…the biggest mistake people make is not acknowledging fear and uncertainty.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

New York Times, "Tiptoeing Out of One’s Comfort Zone (and of Course, Back In)"- Interview) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/your-money/12shortcuts.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Bren%C3%A9%20Brown&st=cse, February 11, 2011.

Warren Farrell photo
Julie Andrews photo
Herman Kahn photo
Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
Eric Hoffer photo
Gaio Valerio Catullo photo

“Henceforth let no woman believe a man's oath, let none believe that a man's speeches can be trustworthy. They, while their mind desires something and longs eagerly to gain it, nothing fear to swear, nothing spare to promise; but as soon as the lust of their greedy mind is satisfied, they fear not then their words, they heed not their perjuries.”
Nunc iam nulla viro iuranti femina credat, nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles; quis dum aliquid cupiens animus praegestit apisci, nil metuunt iurare, nihil promittere parcunt: sed simul ac cupidae mentis satiata libido est, dicta nihil metuere, nihil periuria curant.

LXIV
Carmina

Elizabeth Barrett Browning photo
Karel Zeman photo

“Man has created a grandiose world of technology, of which dread and fear are often the result… Fortunately, events in the world and our way of life are not determined by technology alone.”

Karel Zeman (1910–1989) Czech film director, artist and animator

Člověk si vytvořil grandiózní svět techniky, z kterého jde často hrůza a strach... Naštěstí to není jen technika, která určuje dění světa a způsob života.
Quoted on the website of the Karel Zeman Museum in Prague (in English http://www.muzeumkarlazemana.cz/en/karel-zeman/quotes and Czech http://www.muzeumkarlazemana.cz/cz/karel-zeman/citaty).

John Maynard Keynes photo

“If Mr. Lloyd George had no good qualities, no charms, no fascinations, he would not be dangerous. If he were not a syren, we need not fear the whirlpools.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Mr. Lloyd George: A Fragment, p. 35

Clement Attlee photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Charles Taze Russell photo
Philip Pullman photo
Camille Paglia photo
Muhammad photo

“Fear Allah and treat your children [small or grown] fairly (with equal justice).”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Al-Bukhari and Muslim [citation needed]
Sunni Hadith

Jean de La Bruyère photo
Marc Randazza photo
Billy Joel photo
Aldo Leopold photo

“Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Wherefore Wildlife Ecology?" [1947]; Published in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds.) 1991, p. 337.
1940s

George W. Bush photo
William Cobbett photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo

“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt. […]
This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane's article. […] It is breaking Aristotle's canon—to demand in every enquiry that the degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see further than you do.
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
"A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
Some of these ideas were included in the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949) (see below).

William Allingham photo

“Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Poem: The Fairies http://www.bartleby.com/101/769.html.

Mike Oldfield photo
Wendy Brown photo
Shreya Ghoshal photo

“An award means a lot to me. It brings happiness along with a kind of fear. It brings fear because the award is the responsibility which audiences have put on us. So a singer winning an award should always try to give best of him to the audiences.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

Ghoshal's thoughts about winning awards http://www.timesofindia.com/entertainment/hindi/music/news/I-am-not-a-competitive-person-Shreya-Ghoshal/articleshow/18400625.cms

C. Wright Mills photo

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.
We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom. We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom-the forced actors who take the consequences-are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

Source: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), pp. 184-185.

George Eliot photo
Muhammad photo

“North Korea fears an improvement in relations.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with Chad O'Carroll (2012)

Lewis Mumford photo
Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo
Mary Baker Eddy photo
John Gray photo
David Weber photo
Michael Bloomberg photo

“When you go to Washington now, you can feel a sense of fear in the air – the fear to do anything, or say anything, that might affect the polls, or give the other side an advantage, or offend a special interest.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/public_health/mayor_bloomberg_delivers_opening_address_at_ceasefire_bridging_the_political_divide_conference
Partisanship

Thomas Jefferson photo