Quotes About Terror

That was the thing about terror: it made rational people act irrationally. From a certain perspective, the fear was more destructive than the actual killing.

mingled love and shame for our people, a mingled love and terror of white culture. And then (as if the result of these others), despair and a furious will to extinguish the self. My people's enemies have done this to me. But so have my own loved ones. My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much.

mingled love and shame for our people, a mingled love and terror of white culture. And then (as if the result of these others), despair and a furious will to extinguish the self. My people's enemies have done this to me. But so have my own loved ones. My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much. Let me say with care that the blame is not symmetrical: my enemies forced my loved ones to ask too much of me.

The panic crawled throughout his limbs like a million tiny newborn spiders.

Her fear was infectious, and though I was too young to truly know terror, I felt it in my heart and trembled.

A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.

The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.

Horror is a situation, not a character, no matter how evil one may be.

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

They have called Operation Iraqi Freedom a war of choice that isn't part of the real war on terror. Someone should tell that to al Qaeda.

Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties, and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terror.

Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror.

Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of

What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.

The idea of a specifically Robespierrist terror was a myth, invented by the Termidoreans, the men who overthrew Robespierre, who themselves were very much implicated in the recourse to terror.

The Jacobin leaders were beset on many sides by enemies, both open and covert. But in the end the most dangerous and unforgiving enemies they faced were themselves. In choosing terror, they chose a path that led to self-destruction.

Remaining vigilant toward this ever-present threat means constantly learning how better to protect ourselves. But primarily it reminds us that we must fight and win the war on terror, so that we do not have to fight it here in America.

Poor and immigrant communities feel most directly the spectacle and its terror. Other groups of U.S. residents, especially our threatened middle-class and white communities who (often wrongly) think they are safe from such official terror, are induced by the spectacle of paramilitary sweeps and SWAT operations to support and rationalize the powerful displays of state power.

When the state is given absolute power, in this case to calculate and terminate the end of a human life, the state assumes a power that is "absolute," extending its domination to the borders of life and death. According to Meeropol, when people give that power to the state, they sacrifice their popular sovereignty. Executions function not to serve the people but as another mode of rule in today's theatrics of state terror. I

Whether considering action of the United States abroad or on its home front, I presume two closely related spheres of meaning for this notion of "terror." This word means to put in a state of fright (Latin terror, from terrere, "to frighten," "built on the root," tres-, "to tremble"). The mix of fear and trembling usually immobilizes, works severe injury, or creates lasting disintegration or death on targeted bodies.

We see here the commitment to employ what terrorizes and repels, and does so powerfully, in order to have an effect of keeping certain groups in place or moving them from one realm to another. All of this is to commit those with governing powers to a show, a spectacle that displays power and creates motivating terror.

State terror thereby creates obedience in the bodies of citizens and residents by enlisting the tense stomach and the threatened sphincter as visceral reminders of the external threats. There, terror often abides, in hidden but lethal ways.

A counter-theatric to state terror is an effective militant practice toward this end. This is "radical love" in the sense foregrounded by Cornel West, which bases its challenging love of the enemy not just upon the enemy's needs, but upon an advocacy and fight for "the unloved,"[4] for the oppressed who need effective techniques and institutions of justice into which they can be liberated.

Such a liberating transformation in and against Lockdown America is "spectral," to use a term from my previous writings.[5] By that I mean that the counter-theatric to state terror makes demands. It is a spectral haunting of the suffering present. It makes demands and cultivates expectations that often make repressive powers tremble. For the repressed, though, this specter is laden with promise and hope. What does this spectral liberation look like?