Quotes About Terror

Life is a hideous thing.

Some men live their lives terrified. Terrified of the night and all that is dark. I will live my life eternally in fear of the light of day.

Attack on Terror: The FBI Versus the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.

But perhaps this is what normality is: a complex of dread and terror which compels the psyche to deny and restructure reality. Those who cannot ensconce themselves within social delusions either distort reality and hallucinate their own mirages, or they go mad.

Beauty belongs to the beloved who returns the gaze, in whose eyes we see the sun. But in this . . . beauty, in the mutual gaze, also lies the beginning of terror --awe, idealization, overstimulation, violation, loss.

If only I could have been a fairytale queen, in a beautiful palace, with nothing to do but dance and be beautiful. Now I am a queen of darkness and terror.

Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be.

Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely.

Things become quieter, but the cries do not cease. "What's up, Albert?" I ask. "A couple of columns over there got it in the neck." The cries continued. It is not men, they could not cry so terribly. "Wounded horses," says Kat. It's unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.

Terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; - but it kills, if a man thinks about it.

We forget nothing really . . . the front-line days . . . are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did, we should have been destroyed long ago . . . - terror . . . kills, if a man thinks about it.

It's unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.

I soon found out this much:--terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;--but it kills, if a man thinks about it.

There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.

German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistance. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On

Diels told the reporters, "The value of the SA and the SS, seen from my viewpoint of inspector-general responsible for the suppression of subversive tendencies and activities, lies in the fact that they spread terror. That is a wholesome thing.

had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life.

fearing a "knock-out blow," predicted that the first aerial attack on London would destroy much if not all of the city and kill two hundred thousand civilians. "It was widely believed that London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared," wrote one junior official. Raids would cause such terror among the survivors that millions would go insane. "London for several days will be one vast raving bedlam

All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.

No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man's terror is always holy terror-which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.

In other words, the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one's own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom

Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to die.

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act.

The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.