“There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.”

According to The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln (1867) by F. B. Carpenter, Lincoln quoted this as having been said to him by a fellow-passenger in a stagecoach. See also "Washington during the War", Macmillan's Magazine 6:24 http://books.google.com/books?id=rB4AAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA24&dq=folks (May 1862)
Posthumous attributions
Variant: It's my experience that folks who have no vices have generally very few virtues.

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p.103)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)
Context: There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating. Analyse in this way the hatred of ideas or of the kind of people whom we have once loved and whose faces are preserved in Spirits of Anger. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

As quoted in "‘We have imported a monster called Islam’: Dutch Far-Right leader Geert Wilders says EU should refuse entry to all Muslim migrants" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3708401/Dutch-Far-Right-Freedom-Party-leader-Geert-Wilders-says-EU-refuse-entry-Muslim-migrants.html by Gareth Davies, Mail Online (26 July 2016)
2010s

Source: Poison Princess

The Shining (1977)

Source: Pride and Prejudice

As quoted in * 2020-05-16
Trump seems to think there’d be no coronavirus if there was no testing. It doesn’t work like that.
Aaron Rupar
Source: https://www.vox.com/2020/5/15/21259888/trump-coronavirus-testing-very-few-cases

The Wide Window (2000)

Source: Zone One