
“Most people are more afraid of the unknown than death.”
Future Proofing You (2021)
As quoted in "Space is still the place" by W. Kim Heron in Metro Times (6 June 2007) http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=10582
Context: People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it's like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens. Light and all that — someone made that; it's written that they did. But nobody made the darkness. My music is about dark tradition. Dark tradition means a lot more about than black tradition. There's a lot of division in what they call black. I'm not into division. I'm into coordination, discipline and tradition.
“Most people are more afraid of the unknown than death.”
Future Proofing You (2021)
“Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.”
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Department of Defense news briefing (12 February 2002)
Variant:
Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no "knowns." There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.
:It sounds like a riddle. It isn't a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter.
:There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist. And yet almost always, when we make our threat assessments, when we look at the world, we end up basing it on the first two pieces of that puzzle, rather than all three.
:* Extending on his earlier comments in a press conference at NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium (6 June 2002) http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/s020606g.htm
2000s