Quotes About Fear

Again, it is common knowledge that the movement against the fluoridation of municipal water supplies has been catnip for cranks of all kinds, especially for those who have obsessive fear of poisoning.

The Dreadnought battleship itself was one victor. By its survival (not one was lost) it had appeared to justify both its mighty artillery and the diabolical ingenuity that had been expended on its defences. The other victor was the Dreadnought's first enemy, the torpedo, which governed commanders' judgments, by its threat or its reality caused squadron engagements to be broken off, and whole fleets to flinch away in fear.

Running away just makes your arse a bigger target.

This enemy you cannot kill," I murmured. He nodded and finished the quote for me. "You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.

Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand, Ringil said quietly.

The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterward.

Common men make a distinction between gods and demons, Poltar, but it's ignorance to talk that way. When the powers do our will, we worship them as gods; when they thwart and frustrate us, we hate and fear them as demons. They are the same creatures, the same twisted unhuman things. The shaman's path is negotiation, nothing more. We tend the relationship with the powers so they bring us more benefit than ruin. We can do no more.

What you feel is not yours. You need not own it. Creatures like these breed the fear in you as we fatten a buffalo calf, and with similar intent.

See, once upon a time," Yavuz was saying, "fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That's the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can't live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge's terms a non-adaptive trait.

Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumour, is a far greater power.

His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse's.

That's how you fight wars, after all—with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.

the truth was far more complex, and ultimately far more scary. But who in this universe wants the truth?

The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterwards.

I felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of my skull. That's exactly what you think it is, a calm voice said. Yo do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your cortical stack out of that wall for weeks.

Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn't cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died of." "Which is what?" Yavuz shrugged. "Fear.

Any synthetic intelligence can be independent only within the boundaries of the U.N. regulatory charter. The charter is hardwired into my systems, so in effect I have as much to fear from the police as a human does.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." --H. L. Mencken

If we have plain old ordinary fear then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it--pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. Artistic fear, on the other hand, sounds somehow nastier and more virulent, like it just might not yield to ordinary solutions--and yet it does, the moment we become humble enough to try ordinary solutions.

Jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren't able to get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it. At its root, jealousy is a stingy emotion.

Most of us are really willing only to write well, and this is why the act of writing strains us.

Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

Boredom is just "What's the use?" in disguise. And "What's the use?" is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair.

Real" artists are people who have learned to create despite their fears. They