Quotes about fear

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Address in Memphis, Tennessee (25 October 1905) http://www.trsite.org/content/pages/speaking-loudly
1900s

Talking about drugs, quoted in **
Audioslave Era

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

Preface, p. xi
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001)

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Baptismal Regeneration (1864) http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0573.htm

Recalling his meeting with workers in a field, upon his landing, as quoted in "Life on Mars?" by Jesse Skinner in Toro magazine (14 October 2008) http://www.toromagazine.com/epigraph/d8e350a4-e3e5-2b94-5916-3c4e788b808c/Life-on-Mars/index.html

Plato, Phaedo

The Book of Merlyn (1977)

Canto IV, stanza 1.
The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

Panegyricus de Quarto Consulatu Honorii Augusti, line 290 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Claudian/De_IV_Consulatu_Honorii*.html#290.

21 June 1880
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)
Context: Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion's mane and shake at us... It's as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.

Source: "From Enlightenment to Revolution" (1975), p. 260
Context: But it is useless to subject this hash of uncritical language to critical questioning. We can make no sense of these sentences of Engels unless we consider them as symptoms of a spiritual disease. As a disease, however, they make excellent sense for, with great intensity, they display the symptoms of logophobia, now quite outspokenly as a desperate fear and hatred of philosophy. We even find named the specific object of fear and hatred: it is "the total context of things and of knowledge of things." Engels, like Marx, is afraid that the recognition of critical conceptual analysis might lead to the recognition of a "total context," of an order of being and perhaps even of cosmic order, to which their particular existences would be subordinate. If we may use the language of Marx: a total context must not exist as an autonomous subject of which Marx and Engels are insignificant predicates; if it exists at all, it must exist only as a predicate of the autonomous subjects Marx and Engels. Our analysis has carried us closer to the deeper stratum of theory that we are analysing at present, the meaning of logophobia now comes more clearly into view. It is not the fear of a particular critical concept, like Hegel's Idea, it is rather the fear of critical analysis in general. Submission to critical argument at any point might lead to the recognition of an order of the logos, of a constitution of being, and the recognition of such an order might reveal the revolutionary idea of Marx, the idea of establishing a realm of freedom and of changing the nature of man through revolution, as the blasphemous and futile nonsense which it is.

Book II, lines 55–61 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Speech at Columbia University (1949); published in Speeches 1949 - 1953 p. 402; as quoted in Sources of Indian Tradition (1988) by Stephen Hay, p. 350
Context: In times of crisis it is not unnatural for those who are involved in it deeply to regard calm objectivity in others as irrational, short-sighted, negative, unreal or even unmanly. But I should like to make it clear that the policy India has sought to pursue is not a negative and neutral policy. It is a positive and vital policy that flows from our struggle for freedom and from the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Peace is not only an absolute necessity for us in India in order to progress and develop but also of paramount importance to the world. How can that peace be preserved? Not by surrendering to aggression, not by compromising with evil or injustice but also not by the talking and preparing for war! Aggression has to be met, for it endangers peace. At the same time, the lesson of the past two wars has to be remembered and it seems to me astonishing that, in spite of that lesson, we go the same way. The very processes of marshaling the world into two hostile camps precipitates the conflict that it had sought to avoid. It produces a sense of terrible fear and that fear darkens men's minds and leads them to wrong courses. There is perhaps nothing so bad and so dangerous in life as fear. As a great President of the United States said, there is nothing really to fear except fear itself.

Speech to the Michigan legislature, in Lansing, Michigan (15 May 1952), published in General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908-1964 (2000) by Edward T. Imparato, p. 206, much of this was used in speeches of 1951, as quoted in The Twenty-year Revolution from Roosevelt to Eisenhower (1954) by Chesly Manly, p. 3, and Total Insecurity : The Myth Of American Omnipotence (2004) by Carol Brightman, p. 182<!--
Context: It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.

"Reflections on Gandhi" (1949)
Context: I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired him, after a fashion. Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed. For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded. Again, he seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as E. M. Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a better nature through which they could be approached.

Quoted in Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine (2013) by Phillipe Mather, p. 46
Context: I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.

On being informed that there were authorizations to kill him while he was a prisoner in San Antonio, prior to news of further instructions to transport him to Florida, as quoted in Geronimo and the End of the Apache Wars (1990), by Charles Leland Sonnichsen, p. 102; "Usen" is the Apache word for God, and "Nantan" their word for a leader, spokesman, or "chief".
Context: I will protect my people if I live. For myself I do not fear for I have the word of Usen. Who is the White Nantan to think he can pit his power against that of Usen?

The Counsels of the Holy Father St. Francis, Admonition 27.
Context: Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.

"A Community of the Spirit" in Ch. 1 : The Tavern, p. 2
The Essential Rumi (1995)
Context: Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence. Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

About "Leaf by Niggle", in a letter to Caroline Everett (24 June 1957)
Context: I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with the Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story...

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Context: There are only two forces that unite men — fear and interest. All great revolutions originate in fear, for the play of interests does not lead to accomplishment.

Source: Thebaid, Book III, Line 5

"Joaquin Phoenix's Oscars speech in full: 'We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby'" https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/10/joaquin-phoenixs-oscars-speech-in-full, The Guardian (February 10, 2020).

1976

1980

Source: Speech in the House of Lords on the agricultural depression (29 April 1879), reported in The Times (30 April 1879), p. 8

2001

Source: Gervaso, Roberto. La mosca al naso, Rizzoli Editore (1980)

Source: Northern Farm

Source: The Conquest of Happiness

Paul to the corpse of a French man he has just killed, Ch. 9
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Context: I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

Source: Pirates!

Variant: To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.

Source: Lord of the Flies

Source: Mutant Message Down Under

Source: Macbeth

Source: Browning's Paracelsus: Being the Text of Browning's Poem

Rent (1996)

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)
Source: Unpopular Essays
Context: It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds.

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: Speak

Source: King Lear

Source: Meditations

St. 1
1790s, The Tyger (1794)

Redemption Song; the song was inspired by a speech by Marcus Garvey in Nova Scotia in October 1937, published in his Black Man magazine, Vol. 3, no. 10 (July 1938), pp. 7-11:
We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.
Uprising (1979)

Source: Playing with Fire

Source: Julius Caesar

McKenna interview (1992)
Context: There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery. It's possible to achieve a state where you realize the truth of life and fear disappears, and a lot of people have reached that state, but next to none of them are on Earth. There's probably a few.

Source: Little Women

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Source: Tiger Eyes

Source: The Collected Poems

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Source: The Fiddler

Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Source: The King's Buccaneer

Source: Rich Dad, Poor Dad

New York Times (January 8, 1981)
Source: Ways of Escape

Variant: Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.
Source: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 11, Finds Print of Man's Foot on the Sand.

Source: The Steadfast Tin Soldier

Source: Moon Called

Source: The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef

Source: Gone with the Wind

Source: Inheritance

Source: Women

Part II Section II
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles" (1992), Ch. 7 : Work, §3 : Personal Power, p. 190 (p. 165 in some editions). This famous passage from her book is often erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela. About the mis-attribution Williamson said, "Several years ago, this paragraph from A Return to Love began popping up everywhere, attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural address. As honored as I would be had President Mandela quoted my words, indeed he did not. I have no idea where that story came from, but I am gratified that the paragraph has come to mean so much to so many people."
Variant which appears in the film Coach Carter (2005): "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
Variant which appears in the film Akeelah and the Bee (2006), displayed in a picture frame on the wall, attributing it to Mandela: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."
Context: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.