Quotes about anxiety (434 quotes, page 3)

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Widely attributed online to Auden, this phrase does not occur anywhere in his writings. It is apparently a confused recollection of the title of his long poem The Age of Anxiety (1947). (The phrase "age of anxiety" occurs only in the title of the poem, not in the text, nor in anything else by Auden.)
Misattributed

Age

“The will to power is the will to ecstasy is the will to surrender is the will to submit and, in extremis, to die. Or to put it another way, the rage to attain a freedom and happiness one's psyche cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

Review of Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2003/03/25/willis/index.html, Salon (25 March 2003)

Way , Freedom , Rage , Despair

“We are to do what Paul meant, when he said that he had committed to Christ what He was able to keep. You have treasures that you dare not leave in your own house, and so you lock them up in some safety-deposit vault. When they are thus secured, you feel little anxiety regarding them.”

George C. Lorimer (1838–1904) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 589.

Feeling , Christ , Housing

“Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Source: The One Thing You Need to Know (2005), p. 146

“It's always a source of anxiety, come Emmy time… People are so supportive and so kind, but they put ideas in your head that you don't want to hear. They go, 'I know you're going to win,' and then when you lose, those same people don't want to make eye contact with you. I don't know who's more embarrassed, me or them.”

Scott Clifton (1984) American television actor, musician, internet personality.

Responding to an interviewer's question, "What's going on in your head leading up to tonight?" at the 38th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony. (19 June 2011) http://www.soapoperanetwork.com/interviews/item/4926-backstage-interview-with-daytime-emmy-award-winner-scott-clifton

People , Idea , Support , Time

“The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates — the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"The Consumer Consumed", originally published in Ink (1971)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

Money , World , Fear

“You make your appeal in Piccadilly, London, amongst those who are wallowing in luxuries, proceeding from the labour of the people. You should have gone to the gravel-pits, and made your appeal to the wretched creatures with bits of sacks around their shoulders, and with hay-bands round their legs; you should have gone to the roadside, and made your appeal to the emaciated, half-dead things who are there cracking stones to make the roads as level as a die for the tax eaters to ride on. What an insult it is, and what an unfeeling, what a cold-blooded hypocrite must he be that can send it forth; what an insult to call upon people under the name of free British labourers; to appeal to them in behalf of Black slaves, when these free British labourers; these poor, mocked, degraded wretches, would be happy to lick the dishes and bowls, out of which the Black slaves have breakfasted, dined, or supped…Talk, indeed, of transmuting the wretched Africans into this condition! …Will not the care, will not the anxiety of a really humane Englishman be directed towards the Whites, instead of towards the Blacks, until, at any rate, the situation of the former be made to be as good as that of the latter?”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Letter to Wilberforce, Political Register (30 August 1823), quoted in G. D. H. Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (Greenwood, 1971), p. 259.

People , Dead , Happiness

“The neurotic is always half-drowning in anxiety, and always being half-rescued.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

“The nation which is satisfied is lost. The nation which is not progressive is retrograding. "Rest and be thankful" is a motto which spells decay. The new world seems to possess more of this quality in its crude state, at any rate, than the old. In individuals it sometimes seems to be carried to excess. I do not by this mean the revolutions which periodically ravage the Southern and Central American Republics. I think more of the restless enterprise of the United States, with the devouring anxiety to improve existing machinery and existing methods, and the apparent impossibility of accumulating any fortune, however gigantic, which shall satisfy or be sufficient to allow of leisure and repose. There the disdain of finality, the anxiety for improving on the best seems almost a disease; but in Great Britain we can afford to catch the complaint, at any rate in a mitigated form, and give in exchange some of our own self-complacency, for complacency is a fatal gift. "What was good enough for my father is good enough for me" is a treasured English axiom which, if strictly carried out, would have kept us to wooden ploughs and water clocks. In these days we need to be inoculated with some of the nervous energy of the Americans.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Address as President of the Birmingham and Midland Institute (15 October, 1901).
'Lord Rosebery On National Culture', The Times (16 October, 1901), p. 4.

World , Disease , Thinking , Water

“Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.”

Oswald Chambers book My Utmost for His Highest

My Utmost for His Highest (1956). Section "December 31".

God , Sleep , Past , Future

“War is not horrible all the time, as pacifists seem to believe. There are compensations for everything, and there is compensation in comradeship, intimacy, freedom from economic anxiety, the knowledge that once one's mind is adjusted to the worst that can happen – and that is a pretty bad and bloody wound or swift and sudden death – one settled down to existence as an Infantryman. Man is an adaptable animal – I acknowledge that myself. I adapted myself more easily to the environment of the trenches with its lice, filth, heat, stench, flies, dysentery, danger – I adapted myself to these more successfully, I repeat, than I have been able to adapt myself to this life as a shopkeeper.”

William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician

Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 239

Life , Death , War , Knowledge

“A religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.”

Walter Benjamin book Capitalism as Religion

Im Kapitalismus ist eine Religion zu erblicken, d.h. der Kapitalismus dient essentiell der Befriedigung derselben Sorgen, Qualen, Unruhen, auf die ehemals die so genannten Religionen Antwort gaben.
Translated by Rodney Livingstone in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1 (Harvard: 1996)
Capitalism as Religion (1921)

Religion

“The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.”

Ayn Rand book Philosophy: Who Needs It

Source: Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982), p. 84.

Secret , Way , Knowledge

“The priest who has lost the resilience of youth cannot be helped; his polymorphously playful and imaginative energies have been emasculated by a long conditioning to the ways of the old order; he would be liberated into a sea of undifferentiated boredom and anxiety. Only the man whose desires and passions are intact has a future.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 95

Youth , Way , Imagination , Passion

“[From Cecil Forrester]: Nothing like love-letters for filling up a rainy morning. A mistress gives a man such an interest in himself! You cannot run your fingers through your hair, without a vision of the locket wherein one of your curls reposes on the fairest neck in the world. An east-wind only conjures up a host of "sweet anxieties;" and if the worst comes to the worst, you can sit down and write sonnets to your inamorata's eyebrow.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love , World

“I never heard [my parents] talk between themselves about Palestine or Zionism, and I suspected they had no strong convictions on the subject, at least until after the war, when the horror of the Holocaust made them feel there should be a “National Home.” I felt they were bullied by the organizers of these meetings, and by the gangsterlike evangelists who would pound at the front door and demand large sums for yeshivas or “schools in Israel.” My parents, clearheaded and independent in most other ways, seemed to become soft and helpless in the face of these demands, perhaps driven by a sense of obligation or anxiety. My own feelings […] were passionately negative: I came to hate Zionism and evangelism and politicking of every sort, which I regarded as noisy and intrusive and bullying.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), p. 171

Hate , War , School , Way

“We must not look too dangerous to the enemy. This does not mean that we cannot do anything that threatens him. After all, our mere possession of a Type I Deterrence capability implies that we can harm him if we desire. But it does mean, to the extent that is consistent with our other objectives, we should not make him more insecure than is necessary. We do not want to make him so unhappy and distraught that he will be tempted to end his anxieties by the use of drastic alternatives. We do not wish him to conclude, "better a fearful end than endless fear."”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

We must not appear to be excessively aggressive, irresponsible, trigger-happy, or accident prone, today or in the future.
The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Fear , Appearance , Future

“Anxiety is a useful tool: it forces us to make plans. But when too much anxiety freezes us into indecision, it needs checking.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 33 (p. 506)

Indecision

“Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters.”

Tanith Lee book The Birthgrave

Book Two, Part IV “War March”, Chapter 7 (p. 268)
The Birthgrave (1975)

Fear

“I would say off the cuff that I am an anxious person. I worry about everything. I need to know everything. I tend to live in a state of anxiety with the feeling that life is some kind of great catastrophe. I feel the desire, or rather the intense need, to do something useful for society, and that is what stimulates me. In every situation I always look for what is positive and beneficial for my fellow citizens. I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy — but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

As quoted in "Antoni Tapies" by Serafin Garcia Ibanez in the UNESCO Courier (June 1994) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1994_June/ai_15630919/print?tag=artBody;col1.
1991 - 2000

Life , Feeling , Study , Personality

“Individualism is one of the great foundations of Western culture. But unless society secures personal independence and basic security for the individual, it can lead to disaffection, anxiety, and chaos. For a long time now the United States has been turning toward its Wild West past, while the Nordic nations have been taking individualism in the logical direction of further progress, and into the future.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 9

Time , Past , Future , Personality

“[On inspiration]: I think it comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety.”

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

Paris Review interview (1996)

Way , Feeling , Idea , Thinking

“The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son
Consider the Lobster (2007)

World , Question , Perfection

“How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long – the care of cares – the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven – and straight you find a new stratum there.”

J. Sheridan Le Fanu book Uncle Silas

Source: Uncle Silas (1864), Ch. 53

Lie , Soul

“Communist writers likewise maintain that the Judaic-Christian code of ethics is "class" morality. By this they mean that the Ten Commandments and the ethics of Christianity were created to protect private property and the property class. To show the lengths to which Communist writers have gone to defend this view we will mention several of their favorite interpretations of the Ten Commandments. They believe that "Honor thy Father and thy Mother" was created by the early Hebrews to emphasize to their children the fact that they were the private property of their parents. "Thou shalt not kill" was attributed to the belief of the dominant class that their bodies were private property and therefore they should be protected along with other property rights. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" were said to have been created to implement the idea that a husband was the master of the home and the wife was strictly private property belonging to him. This last line of reasoning led to some catastrophic consequences when the Communists came into power in Russia. In their anxiety to make women "equal with men" and prevent them from becoming private property, they degraded womankind to the lowest and most primitive level. Some Communist leaders advocated complete libertinism and promiscuity to replace marriage and the family.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Women , Men , Marriage , Children

“I know very well what I am about, & that my skies have not been neglected, though they often failed in execution — and often, no doubt, from an over-anxiety about them — which will alone destroy that easy appearance which nature always has — in all her movements.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to Rev. John Fisher (23 October 1821), from John Constable's Correspondence, part 6, pp. 76-78
1820s

Nature , Appearance

“Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 162

“The main source of psychopathic diseases is the fundamental instinct of fear with its manifestations, the feeling of anxiety, anguish, and worry.”

Boris Sidis (1867–1923) American psychiatrist

Source: The Causation and Treatment of Psychopathic Diseases (1916), p. 33

Fear , Disease , Feeling

“Today it's possible to paint one canvas with the calmness of an ancient Greek and the next with the anxiety of a Van Gogh. Either of these emotions, and any in between, is valid to me... I work on many canvasses at once. In the morning I line them up against the wall of my studio. Some speak, some do not. They are my mirrors. They tell me what I am like at that moment.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

I Cannot Evolve Any Concrete Theory, William Baziotes, in Possibilities, Vol. I, no. 1, New York, winter 1947-48, p. 2
1940s

Painting

“Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”

Sigmund Freud book The Interpretation of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in a footnote Freud added to the Second Edition in 1909 (see Psychoanalytic Pioneers, p. 46 http://books.google.com/books?id=Fro5MZry5FcC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA46#v=onepage&q&f=false.)
1900s

Birth

“[The Cinderella Complex] used to hit girls of sixteen or seventeen, preventing them, often, from going to college, hastening them into early marriages. Now it tends to hit women after college—after they've been out in the world awhile. When the first thrill of freedom subsides and anxiety rises to take its place, they begin to be tugged by that old yearning for safety: the wish to be saved.”

Colette Dowling (1938)

Source: The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence (1981), pp. 69–70

Women , Marriage , World , Girl

“The beast is always doomed. It’s better to face the fact honestly and not pretty it up with a lot of lies about blowing off steam and reducing tensions and getting rid of this and that, acting out anxieties, moment of truth. Piddle. There’s an ancient word, I don’t know what language it is. Bazazz. All those arguments are a lot of bazazz. Unless you’re wiping out vermin or hunting for meat to eat, the man who kills animals does so because he likes to kill. And people who like to watch do so because they like to see things being killed.”

Avram Davidson (1923–1993) novelist

Source: Rogue Dragon (1965), Chapter XI (p. 137)

People , Truth , Animals

“Solitude is the mother of anxieties.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 222
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Solitude

“Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 7
An American Dream (1965)

Love , God , Religion , Courage

“Here I have been able to make some good spring studies in oils, and managed to finish my 'Cow-girl' and my 'seared Woman', and my 'London Park', Primrose Hill. I think these pictures have improved a great deal from the point of view of unity. How different from the studies! I am more than ever in favour of taking one's impression from memory; it is less the actual thing - vulgarity disappears, leaving only an aura of truth glimpsed, sensed. To think that this is not understood, so that my anxiety for the future continues as before, despite the success of the exhibition.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

I have no news from Paris about my collectors.
Quote in a letter to his son Lucien, 26 April 1892, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock - , Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 144
1890's

Truth , Girl , Spring , Thinking

“Some professors and especially younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology. (That's perhaps a little extreme.) In my field I have always argued for the pluralistic approach to things rather than solidification into some particular line (even my own line) of work. But there is a great deal of anxiety. I think it is true that scholars, both young and old, are overly anxious about pluralism, diversity, conflict-younger ones especially because when they're first getting into a field they want to know what it is they're supposed to know, but older ones, too, because they somehow yearn for a lost paradise when everyone knew what they were doing.”

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) American anthropologist

"Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction", 1991

Thinking

“In Taoist thought, the good life comes spontaneously; but spontaneity is far from simply acting on the impulses that occur to us. In Western traditions such as Romanticism, spontaneity is linked with subjectivity. In Taoism it means acting dispassionately, on the basis of an objective view of the situation at hand. The common man cannot see things objectively, because his mind is clouded by anxiety about achieving his goals. Seeing clearly means not projecting our goals into the world; acting spontaneously means acting according to the needs of the situation. Western moralists will ask what is the purpose of such action, but for Taoists the good life has no purpose. It is like swimming in a whirlpool, responding to the currents as they come and go. 'I enter with the inflow, and emerge with the outflow, follow the Way of the water, and do not impose my selfishness upon it. This is how I stay afloat in it,' says the Chuang-Tzu. In this view, ethics is simply a practical skill, like fishing or swimming. The core of ethics is not choice or conscious awareness, but the knack of knowing what to do. It is a skill that comes with practice and an empty mind.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: Animal virtues (p. 113)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life , World , Way , Fish

“The first existentialist was not Sartre, though he coined the term. Nor was it Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, though most of the textbooks say so. Nor was it even Pascal, though he foreshadowed half of Kierkegaard and was the first to write about the fundamental existential experience of cosmic anxiety and meaninglessness. It was not even Saint Augustine, whose Confessions stands out as the profoundest example of depth psychology and existential autobiography ever written. It was not even Socrates, who alone among philosophers totally existed his philosophy.
Rather, the first existentialist was Solomon, or whoever wrote Ecclesiastes.”

Peter Kreeft (1937) American philosopher

Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes: Life as Vanity, Job: Life as Suffering, Song of Songs: Life as Love, p. 18

“Many university departments—especially the traditional resource disciplines such as fisheries, wildlife, range management, and forestry—are closely tied to industry or hook‐and‐bullet recreation and treat conservation biology with anxiety or disdain.”

Reed Noss (1952)

[The failure of universities to produce conservation biologists, Conservation Biology, 11, 6, December 1997, 1267–1269, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1997.97ed05.x] (quote from p. 1267)

Universe

“Humanitarianism … occurs where a powerful group seeks to curb the activities of another group in their own better interests. They define them as a social problem and demands that action be taken to ameliorate their situation. This is complicated in the case of marihuana smoking, in so far as those individuals who make up the social problem would deny that any real problem exists at all.
I would argue that the humanitarian motive is exceedingly suspect; for it is often—though not necessarily—a rationalization behind which is concealed either a conflict of interests or moral indignation. For example Alex Comfort in The Anxiety Makers has charted the way in which the medical profession have repeatedly translated their moral indignation over certain ‘abuses’ into a clinically backed humanitarianism. For example, masturbation was once seen as causing psychosis, listlessness and impotence, and various barbaric clinical devices were evolved to prevent young people from touching their genital organs.”

Jock Young (1942–2013) British sociologist and criminologist

“The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy,” Images of Deviance (1971), p. 31

People , Way , Motivation , Problem

“How much we’ll tell down there, how much,
and how very different we’ll appear.
What we protect here like sleepless guards,
wounds and secrets locked inside us,
protect with such great anxiety day after day,
we’ll disclose freely and clearly down there.”

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933) Greek poet

“The Rest I Will Tell to Those Down to Hades” http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=173&cat=4
Collected Poems (1992)

Secret , Appearance

“Pride is a reaction formation to the feeling of inferiority, of the experience of powerlessness, of not being worthy enough of love. Only anxiety compels a person to lose moderation and to want to be more than he is. Out of fear of being an animal, he has to become an angel. Out of fear of being a nothing, a god. Anxiety never allows him to be simply a man.”

Eugen Drewermann (1940) German psychologist and theologian

Strukturen des Bösen III LXXVII (fifth edition 1986)

Love , God , Fear , Angels

“At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films — the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us — that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it's eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?”

Pauline Kael book Deeper into Movies

"Stanley Strangelove" (January 1972) http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0051.html, review of A Clockwork Orange
Deeper into Movies (1973)

People , Pleasure , Fools , Sex

“Because of the nature of the penis, men have performance anxiety, whereas no woman ever has to prove herself in this way. So men's egos are totally involved in performance, in doing, achieving. An erection is a kind of achievement. So is peeing. As I've said, a boy has to learn to aim in order to no longer be infantile. So it's an accomplishment. The male orgasm is short-lived and transient — and that's the irony of men's sexuality. It's ironic that feminism looks at the penis as power and violence when in fact it is very weak.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Men , Way , Boy , Nature

“It is true that in thus giving his love to fragile beings man becomes more vulnerable. He who passionately loves a woman, children, or his country gives hostages to fortune. He will be tortured from then on, though he be in good health, put down though he be powerful, forced to ask for mercy though he be courageous and hardened to suffering. Fortune has him in her grasp. He is forced to watch with burning anxiety the sickness of those he love tenderly - a suffering far worse than that caused by any malady of his own, because his physical powers are intact. He wants to help, but feels utterly useless. He would like to surrender himself instead of his precious hostages, and sickness - arrogant and tyrannical - chooses its victims relentlessly. In spite of himself he feels like a coward and a traitor, because he has escaped. This is the cruellest of all human torments.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness

Love , Children , Health , Feeling

“I believe that people want to turn from fear towards hope, from divisiveness towards unity, from intolerance to an understanding that we all belong to one great community. Within all the chaos, within the despair, the not knowing, the anger, the anxiety, there is always the possibility for change. There is a seed of hope. And I'm not talking about a pie-in-the-sky kind of hope, but a kind of hope that calls on each and every one of us to stand up and be counted — a kind of hope that calls on each and every one of us to give the very best of ourselves — not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all of us, collectively.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Speech at LGBT Community Center's 25th Anniversary and 11th Annual Women's Event, New York, New York (1 November 2009) http://jennifer-beals.com/media/speeches/womens11.html.

People , Fear , Hope , Communication

“Viewed against such a backdrop, there is creeping anxiety about the future of our nation, characterised as it is by deep communal divisions and a disturbingly high rate of out-migration of our skilled people.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

Address to the conference of the Fiji Labour Party, Lautoka, 31 July 2005

People , Communication , Future

“People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety, people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

Source: Audition (1997), Chapter One

People , Sex , Loneliness , Madness

“To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.”

Umberto Eco book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994) Chapter Four: "Possible Woods"

People , World , Game , Sense

“The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 269

Love

“This mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took part in it. With very few exceptions, nearly all those detailed to do this monstrous "work," and who, like myself, have given sufficient thought to the matter, have been deeply marked by these events. Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them. Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked; is it necessary that we do this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler's order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jews had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed for ever from their relentless adversaries. There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler's order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts.”

Rudolf Höss (1901–1947) German war criminal, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp

Quoted in "Commandant of Auschwitz" (1951)

Women , Men , Children , Secret

“Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.”

Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) British author

'Loser Take All', Sunday Times, p. 5 (27 May 1956)

World , Religion , Way , Problem

“What makes a teenage boy’s anxiety so overwhelming is that a teenage boy’s socialization is the demand to perform without the resources to perform. As a result, not only are his risks many, but his failures many. And so apparent… Second, the biggest winners—the football players—are receiving love via self-abuse. For some boys, receiving love via self-abuse creates anxiety. But losing love creates even more anxiety.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 167.

Love , Boy , Failure , Football

“Good communication is not just data transfer. You need to show people something that addresses their anxieties, that accepts their anger, that is credible in a very gut-level sense, and that evokes faith in the vision.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Step 4, p. 84
The Heart of Change, (2002)

People , Faith , Communication , Sense

“The pretext for indecisiveness is commonly mature deliberation; but in reality indecisive men occupy themselves less in deliberation than others; for to him who fears to decide, deliberation (which has a foretaste of that fear) soon becomes intolerably irksome, and the mind escapes from the anxiety of it into alien themes.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Source: The Statesman (1836), Ch. 21. p. 144

Men , Fear , Reality , Indecision

“In moments of great anxiety there is a sort of natural superstition about the heart, which the reason rejects in cooler moments.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Nature , Heart

“SOLON CR is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient’s perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with “the future” has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 95

Fear , Thinking , Distant , Future

“When I sat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and listened to American delegations appealing in behalf of kinsman or old home folks across the seas, I caught the aspirations of nationality, and the perfectly natural sympathy among kindred in this republic. But I little realized then how we might rend the concord of American citizenship in our seeking to solve Old World problems. There have come to me, not at all unbecomingly, the expressed anxieties of Americans foreign born who are asking our country's future attitude on territorial awards in the adjustment of peace. They are Americans all, but they have a proper and a natural interest in the fortunes of kinsfolk and native lands. One cannot blame them. If our land is to settle the envies, rivalries, jealousies, and hatreds of all civilization, these adopted sons of the Republic want the settlement favorable to the land from which they came.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1920s, Nationalism and Americanism (1920)

World , Jealousy , Peace , Home

“God's Torah teaches us to refrain from inflicting unnecessary pain on any animal. And not only physical pain; an animal can suffer mental pain too. … It is an important part of Torah education to train children to respect animals as sensitive beings which should not be unnecessarily deprived of the joys of life. Do not forget that the child who crudely delights in the suffering of an injured beetle or the anxiety of a harassed animal will soon be numb towards human pain too. … It seems doubtful from all that has been said whether the Torah would sanction "factory farming," which treats animals as machines, with apparent insensitivity to their natural needs and instincts.”

Aryeh Carmell (1917–2006) British rabbi

Masterplan: Judaism, Its Program, Meanings and Goals (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1991), pp. 68 https://books.google.it/books?id=uQxdgZikdCcC&pg=PA68-69.

Life , God , Pain , Children

“Notwithstanding all the care and anxiety of the persons who frame Acts of Parliament to guard against every event, it frequently turns out that certain cases were not foreseen.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Farmer v. Legg (1797), 7 T. R. 190.

Personality

“Arguments to the effect that it is wrong to cause pain and suffering to animals are often rejected by claiming that animals simply do not suffer. … Ironically, it is precisely upon the assumption that animals do suffer from stress, fear, and pain in a manner similar to humans that the validity of much of animal experimentation rests. Few, if any, conditions are studied as widely in animals as are pain, stress, ulcers, fear, and anxiety.”

Deborah Mayo American philosopher

Source: Against a Scientific Justification of Animal Experiments, pp. 345-346

Pain , Fear , Study , Suffering

“Democracy, it is quite true, has been a failure in many countries, but let me put this idea before you. Democracy was grafted in those countries on a stem of Absolutism, and the graft does not do well. It is not a natural growth, and in many countries Democracy blundered into chaos…But for us to surrender our liberty would indeed be to graft something completely alien on to the stem of an old oak. Do not forget, in spite of what is happening abroad, there are freedom-loving men and women in every country to-day in Europe. And you cannot think what anxiety they are looking to this country to-day as the last stronghold of freedom, standing like a rock in a tide that is threatening to submerge the world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (6 March 1934); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 23
1934

Love , Women , Men , World

“I thank God humbly and sincerely. God, who has visited us with many trials, and led us like the Israelites of old from place to place without any certain abode, bless, we beseech Thee, our return home, and mercifully grant that the afflictions and anxieties of that long probation may bear fruit in a more self-denying and godly life; and that we may have our hearts fixed on a yet more abiding resting-place, eternal in the heavens, for Jesus Christ's sake.”

James David Forbes (1809–1868) Scottish physicist and glaciologist

Excerpt of Forbes' journal. September 1854. As quoted in Life and letters of James David Forbes p. 369.

Life , God , Home , Affliction

“Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 23

Men , Art , History , Science

“And thus daily, and month by month, and year by year, he will work at his mind, training it in these consecutive habits of thought, and he will learn to choose that of which he thinks; he will no longer allow thoughts to come and go; he will no longer permit a thought to grip him and hold him; he will no longer let a thought come into the mind and fix itself there and decline to be evicted; he will be master within his own house… he will say: “No; no such anxiety shall remain within my mind; no such thought shall have shelter within my mind; within this mind nothing stays that is not there by my choice and my invitation, and that which comes uninvited shall be turned outside the limits of my mind.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: https://theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/Annie%20Besant-In-The-Outer-Court.pdf In the Outer Court, 1895, p. 60

Thinking , Learning , Housing , Training

“Whatever our situation, we feel some sense of confusion, anxiety, and helplessness. At the same time, we think about God and wonder where He is.”

John Townsend (1952) Canadian clinical psychologist and author

Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)

God , Feeling , Thinking , Sense

“Stress, loneliness, depression, boredom- the madness of everyday life. Ever-greater levels of sadness, implying a recognition, on the visceral level at least, that things could be different. How much joy is there left in the technological society, this field of alienation and anxiety.”

John Zerzan book Future Primitive and Other Essays

"The Mass Psychology of Misery"
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)

Life , Sadness , Joy , Loneliness

“[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Spokespersons of US Right 'In Most Cases Stunningly Ignorant, Interview in Der Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,733079,00.html (December 6, 2010).

People , Search , Understanding , Dependency

“Fatal heart attacks can be triggered by 'anger in all degrees, depression, and anxiety… This doctor states that anxiety places more stress on the heart than any other stimulus, including physical exercise and fatigue.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Cited in: McMillen, S.I (1963) None of These Diseases Fleming H. Revell, Co., Westwood, NJ. p. 61

Exercises , Heart , Anger

“The Institution has been devised to afford the means of receiving your children at an early age, almost as soon as they can walk. By this means many of you, mothers and families, will be able to earn a better maintenance or support for your children; you will have less care and anxiety about them, while the children will be prevented from acquiring any bad habits. and gradually prepared to learn the best.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark (1816)

Children , Age , Family , Support

“The possibility for compassionate concern for others, which is present in all humans, is usually mixed with the sense of ego and so becomes confused with the need to satisfy one's own cravings for recognition and self-evaluation. The spontaneous compassion that arises when one is not caught in the habitual patterns - when one is not perfoming volitional actions out of karmic cause and effect - is not done with a sense of need for feedback from its recipient. It is the anxiety about feedback - the response of the other - that causes us tension and inhibition in our action. When action is done withouth the business-deal mentality, there can be relaxation. This is called supreme (or transcendental) generosity.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Source: The Embodied Mind (1991), p. 249

Business , Sense

“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.

Men , War , People , World

“If the question of the distribution of wealth were solved for all society and all lived in average comfort and without urgent anxiety, the question would still be how many would be at peace with their own souls and have that enduring joy and contentment which alone can make the outward things fair and sweet and rise victorious over change.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.2 The Social Aims of Jesus, p. 47

Peace , Soul , Question , Change

“Question: Is not the person who has been transported to interior detachment freed from external exercises?
Answer: One sees few people reach the condition you describe without their strength being wasted. The efforts of those who really achieve it affect them to the marrow. And so, when they realise what is to be done and left undone, they continue to practise the usual exercises, performing them more or less frequently as their strength and the occasion permit.
Question: Where do the pangs of conscience and other anxieties of seemingly good people come from, as well as the unrestrained latitude (of conscience) in other people?
Answer: Both types are focusing their attention on their own image but in different ways; the one group spiritually, the other bodily.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

People , Way , Exercises , Question

“From Stonewall to the first AIDS alert was only twelve short years. In the Eighties and early Nineties, displaced anxiety over the horror of AIDS turned gay activists into raging nihilists and monomaniacs, who dishonestly blamed the disease on the government and trampled on the rights of the gay majority, and whose errors of judgement materially aided the rise and consolidation of the far right. AIDS did not appear out of nowhere. It was a direct result of the sexual revolution, which my generation unleashed with the best intentions, but whose worst effects were to be suffered primarily by gay men.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 68

Men , Disease , Error , Suffering

“Ideas, passionately promoted and put to the test—that’s what politics can be. That’s what our country can be…It can be a confident America, where we have a basic faith in politics and leaders. It can be a place where we’ve earned that faith. All of us as leaders can hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity and decency. Instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations. Instead of playing the identity politics of “our base” and “their base,” we unite people around ideas and principles. And instead of being timid, we go bold.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

College Republican National Committee, "Paul Ryan's Unshakeable Optimism in the American Dream" http://www.crnc.org/paul-ryans-unshakeable-optimism-america/ 15 April 2016

People , Faith , Confidence , Idea

“Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Conclusion, p. 543
The Coming of Age (1970)

Life

“I still feel just as I told you, that I shall come safely out of this war. I felt so the other day when danger was near. I certainly enjoyed the excitement of fighting our way out of Giles to the Narrows as much as any excitement I ever experienced. I had a good deal of anxiety the first hour or two on account of my command, but not a particle on my own account. After that, and after I saw that we were getting on well, it was really jolly. We all joked and laughed and cheered constantly.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (26 May 1862)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

War , Way , Feeling , Fight

“Behold, most beloved reader, thus true faith or true knowledge begets love, and love begets obedience to the commandments of God. Therefore Christ Jesus says, "He that believeth on him is not condemned." Again at another place, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth my words, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death into life," Jn. 5:24. For true evangelical faith is of such a nature that it cannot lay dormant; but manifests itself in all righteousness and works of love; it dies unto flesh and blood; destroys all forbidden lusts and desires; cordially seeks, serves and fears God; clothes the naked; feeds the hungry; consoles the afflicted; shelters the miserable; aids and consoles all the oppressed; returns good for evil; serves those that injure it; prays for those that persecute it; teaches, admonished and reproves with the Word of the Lord; seeks that which is lost; binds up that which is wounded; heals that which is diseased and saves that which is sound. The persecution, suffering and anxiety which befalls it for the sake of the truth of the lord, is to it a glorious joy and consolation.”

Menno Simons (1496–1561) Dutch theologian, founder of the Mennonites

Ibid, p.246

Love , Life , Death , God

“…the Indian tradition of non-violence and purity of motive and means, the tradition of ethical and religious approach to all political questions and noted that these had found a perfect embodiment in Mahatma Gandhi…One could draw up a whole declaration of human rights in terms of ahimsa. If individuals and nations are animated by such a belief in a beneficent Supreme Power; in truth and in human brotherhood, we can look forward to a future free from anxiety and fear and full of hope and promise of happiness.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In another of his speeches on Indian tradition quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Truth , Fear , Hope , Motivation

“Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Love , Hate

“The ultimate beauty secret for a woman getting older is, Don't be too thin! When you are just muscle, you end up being gaunt in the face, and that makes you look older by 5 or 10 years. I don't think of getting older as looking better or worse; it's just different. You change, and that's OK. Life is about change. I don't have anxiety about it, so I'm not running to get Botox. Maybe that will change, but I don't think so. I feel comfortable in my skin and comfortable with aging, so I think it's OK that I get wrinkles.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

From Self Magazine, December 2010

Life , Secret , Age , Beauty

“It shews the anxiety of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event, to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Referring to the Glorious Revolution of 1688
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Men , Parent , Future

“There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Knowledge

“What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience—and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself—consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 180
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

World , Learning , Waiting

“Good morning everyone. This past week we've seen the best and the worst of humanity. The heinous terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, in Iraq and Nigeria. They showed us once again the depths of the terrorist's depravity. And at the same time we saw the world come together in solidarity. Parisians opening their doors to anyone trapped in the street, taxi drivers turning off their meters to get people home safety, people lining up to donate blood. These simple human acts are a powerful reminder that we cannot be broken and in the face of terror we stand as one. In the wake of these terrible events, I understand the anxiety that many Americans feel. I really do. I don't dismiss the fear of a terrorist bomb going off. There's nothing President Obama and I take more seriously though, than keeping the American people safe. In the past few weeks though, we've heard an awful lot of people suggest that the best way to keep America safe is to prevent any Syrian refugee from gaining asylum in the United States. So let's set the record straight how it works for a refugee to get asylum. Refugees face the most rigorous screening of anyone who comes to the United States. First they are finger printed, then they undergo a thorough background check, then they are interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security. And after that the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Defense and the Department of State, they all have to sign off on access. And to address the specific terrorism concerns we are talking about now, we've instituted another layer of checks just for Syrian refugees. There is no possibility of being overwhelmed by a flood of refugees landing on our doorstep tomorrow. Right now, refugees wait 18 to 24 months while the screening process is completed. And unlike in Europe, refugees don't set foot in the United States until they are thoroughly vetted. Let's also remember who the vast majority of these refugees are: women, children, orphans, survivors of torture, people desperately in need medical help. To turn them away and say there is no way you can ever get here would play right into the terrorists' hands. We know what ISIL - we know what they hope to accomplish. They flat-out told us. Earlier this year, the top ISIL leader al-Baghdadi revealed the true goal of their attacks. Here's what he said: "Compel the crusaders to actively destroy the gray zone themselves. Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one and two choices. Either apostatize or emigrate to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution." So it's clear. It's clear what ISIL wants. They want to manufacture a clash between civilizations. They want frightened people to think in terms of "us versus them."They want us to turn our backs on Muslims victimized by terrorism. But this gang of thugs peddling a warped ideology, they will never prevail. The world is united in our resolve to end their evil. And the only thing ISIL can do is spread terror in hopes that we will in turn, turn on ourselves. We will betray our ideals and take actions, actions motivated by fear that will drive more recruits into the arms of ISIL. That's how they win. We win by prioritizing our security as we've been doing. Refusing to compromise our fundamental American values: freedom, openness, tolerance. That's who we are. That's how we win. May God continue to bless the United States of America and God bless our troops.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Weekly presidential address http://www.c-span.org/video/?401096-1/weekly-presidential-address (21 November 2015).
2010s

Women , God , Children , People

“The anxiety about death is met in two ways. The reality of death is excluded from daily life to the highest possible degree. The dead are not allowed to show that they are dead; they are transformed into a mask of the living. The other and more important way of dealing with death is the belief in a continuation of life after death, called the immortality of the soul. This is not a Christian and hardly a Platonic doctrine. Christianity speaks of resurrection and eternal life, Platonism of a participation of the soul in the transtemporal sphere of essences. But the modern idea of immortality means a continuous participation in the productive process.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 110

Life , Death , Way , Soul

“If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.”

Amit Ray (1960) Indian author

OM Chanting and Meditation (2010) http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/OM_Chanting_and_Meditation.html?id=3KKjPoFmf4YC,

Depressing , Life

“The crop of spiritual talent that is born to you, of human nobleness and intellect and heroic faculty, this is infinitely more important than your crops of cotton or corn, or wine or herrings or whale-oil, which the Newspapers record with such anxiety every season.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)

Wine , Season

“In the past, both sexes were anxious about sex and pregnancy. Now the pill minimizes her anxiety and condoms increase his. Now the pimple faced boy must still risk rejection while also overcoming his own fear of herpes and AIDS and reassuring her there is nothing to fear. He must still do the sexual risk-taking, but now he can be put in jail if he takes risks too quickly or be called a wimp if he doesn’t take them quickly enough.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 168.

Fear , Sex , Boy , Past

“Mixed feelings when he [Max Ernst frequently writes about himself in the third person] enters the forest for the first time: delight and oppression. And what the Romantics spoke of as 'being at one with Nature'. Wonderful joy in breathing freely in an open space, but also anxiety at being encircled by hostile trees. Outside and inside at the same time, free and trapped.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Room 6, Max Ernst', the exhibition text of FONDATION BEYELER 2 - MAX ERNST, 2013, texts: Raphaël Bouvier & Ioana Jimborean; ed. Valentina Locatelli; transl. Karen Williams
Max Ernst is describing an early childhood experience, in the third person
posthumous

Hostility , Feeling , Nature , Tree