Quotes About Fear

That which is the power and worth of life they must be, or die; and the vague consciousness of this makes them afraid. They love their poor existence as it is; God loves it as it must be—and they fear him.

Every pain and every fear, yes, every doubt is a cry after God. What mother refuses to go to her child because he is only crying, not calling her by name!

And when we met amid the shadows, we were wrapped in the mantle of love, and from its folds looked out fearless on the ghostly world about us. Ghosts or none, they never annoyed us. Our love was a talisman, yea, an elixir of life, which made us equal to the twice-born—the disembodied dead. And they were as a wall of fear about us, to keep far off the unfriendly foot and the prying eye.

People who have suffered every hardship and atrocity, and who have every reason to fear that they will suffer them again, may submit tamely, or they may fight for survival. The English and Scots of the frontier were not tame folk.

it wasn't that I'd grown any braver as I got older - the reverse if anything

Herein, too, lies a despicable certainty: the galaxy is rife with terror. It crowds the shadows, lurks at the threshold, watches from behind every half-closed door. The dark side is ever present, waiting to tempt the unwary, to make monsters of the benign, to twist the bright spark of the imagination toward fear. Yes, the ways of the dark side are insidious indeed, but they are not unknown—not if you know where to look. Or should that be . . . where not to look?

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.

But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.

Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened —that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.

the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.