Quotes About Fear

Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with good clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.

The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are..

Have you ever been so scared of something you move toward it, try to touch it, that kind of thing?

We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.

I was feeling insecure you might not love me anymore

Why in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear. Why on earth are you there, when you're everywhere-come and get your share.

My defenses were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn't know how to cry. Simple.

The prudent leader "dreads and reflects on everything that can happen to him but is bold when he is in the thick of action." Xerxes listens patiently, but objects that "if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers.

Reassuring withdrawals, Clausewitz writes in On War, "are very rare." More often armies and nations fail to distinguish orderly disengagements from abject capitulations—or foresight from fear.

You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters… with the strength of faith…. You must be strong with the strength of hope…. You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death…. When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with faith in man…. There is therefore no need to fear.89

The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, there was now reason for hope that it would never take place.

If cats don't encounter people by the time they're 10 weeks old, they will always be scared of them.

What worries you masters you.

The federal government was giving no guidance that a reasoning person could credit. Few local governments did better. They left a vacuum. Fear filled it. The government's very efforts to preserve "morale" fostered the fear, for since the war began, morale—defined in the narrowest, most shortsighted fashion—had taken precedence in every public utterance. As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, "The first casualty when war comes is truth.

Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follows uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear.

When the Washington Post asked Tom Frieden, then head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, what scared him the most, what kept him up at night, he replied, "The biggest concern is always for an influenza pandemic . . . [It] really is the worst-case scenario.

I am Public Opinion. All men fear me!

that fear was "an important element to be bred in the civilian population. It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane. To fight for an ideal, perhaps, must be coupled with thoughts of self-preservation.

Closing saloons and theaters and churches meant nothing if significant numbers of people continued to climb onto streetcars, continued to go to work, continued to go to the grocer. Even where fear closed down businesses, where both store owners and customers refused to stand face-to-face and left orders on sidewalks, there was still too much interaction to break the chain of infection. The

Fear began to break down the community of the city. Trust broke down. Signs began to surface of not just edginess but anger, not just finger-pointing or protecting one's own interests but active selfishness in the face of general calamity. The hundreds of thousands sick in the city became a great weight dragging upon it. And the city began to implode in chaos and fear.

Even where fear closed down businesses, where both store owners and customers refused to stand face-to-face and left orders on sidewalks, there was still too much interaction to break the chain of infection. The virus was too efficient, too explosive, too good at what it did. In the end the virus did its will around the world.

conditions such as these, terror follows fear.

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good.