Quotes About Fear

What keeps a person passive and compliant," he explained, "is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don't ultimately matter—money, career, physical safety—you can overcome that fear.

I only have one fear in doing all of this," he said, which is "that people will see these documents and shrug, that they'll say, 'we assumed this was happening and don't care.' The only thing I'm worried about is that I'll do all this to my life for nothing.

Most remarkably, Americans now considered the danger of surveillance of greater concern than the danger of terrorism:

Radical expansions of power are often introduced in this way, by persuading people that they affect just a specific, discrete group. Governments have long convinced populations to turn a blind eye to oppressive conduct by leading citizens to believe, rightly or wrongly, that only certain marginalized people are targeted, and everyone else can acquiesce to or even support that oppression without fear that it will be applied to them.

Progress both in the United States and other nations was only ever achieved through the ability to challenge power and orthodoxies and to pioneer new ways of thinking and living. Everyone, even those who do not engage in dissenting advocacy or political activism, suffers when that freedom is stifled by the fear of being watched.

I don't know that I'm afraid of anything anymore. Once you experience war you can never be the same. You see the world differently.

Aircraft don't typically fall out of the sky.

I've learned enough about human nature to know that behind anger or bitterness or hurt there's always a wound, or fear, or frustration.

My friend Jeffrey Deaver, successful author of The Bone Collector and many other thrillers, confessed once that his first short story, written as a child, was a Bond-inspired spy adventure (he refused to let me read it . . . afraid, maybe, that I might try to publish it as The Bond Collector).

Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyways.

Hugo, child, have I ever said that I loved you? Do you know that your fists are clenched? You aren't going to strike me-' She had smiled. Then he had burst into tears. He had never mentioned love either, but it had not occurred to him that it might not be identical with what they had enjoyed.

What is the very first thing we are to do in trouble? Fear not. If we fear, we open the door to the devil. If we trust God, we open the door to God.

Fear not!" were usually the first words out of their mouths. That's because fear and faith don't mix. They cannot come out of you at the same time. When you begin saying things that are out of line with the Word of God by speaking in fear instead of in faith, you bind the hands of your angels. You prevent them from doing

Actually, offense is a sign of fear. If you're offended, it's because you're afraid that person can harm you in some way.

Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind.

I was the only "girl writer," probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, "Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.

Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule.

Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn't have to talk—and I had been both.

This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others? But with all the power and money that is behind it, this backlash could imprison us in a hierarchy all over again. As

As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women's absence from quest-for-identity novels, "there's probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.

this country is transforming before our eyes. In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others?

It is hard to give up what you know for what you don't know.

despite a conducive environment and comforting faith, there is unease among the rooms' inhabitants, a rising tide of something close to fear. They know that a terrible ghost is abroad in the cloisters of Microsoft. The

The linen felt perilously thin between them, and she could feel the well-muscled contours of his chest and thighs and... and that obscene dagger with which he wished to impale her.