Quotes About Fear

There was nothing like fear to make democracy real.

I was supposed to be the captain of this damn rocket ship and I was sure going to clobber the guy that tied me out on the nose of the thing. Here we were going through space a million miles an hour and we were pointed right at the moon and we were going to crash for sure and my head wasn't that hard. I had a pretty good idea what would happen when the moon and I met head on.

An ugly blue- steeled Mauser leaped into his hand as his finger curled hungrily around its trigger.

Rico'nun 'hurda' tan?m?na uyduÄŸunu söylemek güç olsa da, o kendisinin teknik bilgi aç?s?ndan 'gerileme dönemine' girmek üzere olduÄŸunu düÅŸünüyor. Bu noktada, toplumun gençliÄŸe yapt??? vurguyla, kendisinin yaÅŸlanma konusundaki fikirleri birleÅŸiyor. Toplumsal önyarg?, kiÅŸinin içindeki güçten düÅŸme korkusunu körüklüyor.

Don't thank me," she said. "I didn't do it out of any love for you. If I'd refused, you'd have killed me. This way, I've got a few hours' head start.

My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.

With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for the having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.

And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.

I was seized by doubt. Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead.

We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.

He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear

Toward no one in the world did he feel any fear now, for he knew that fear was useless; and toward no one in the world did he feel any hate now, for he knew that hate would not help him. Though

to see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.

In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is everywhere.

The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever," Howe declared. "It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture." A

I thought they was hard and I acted hard. He paused, then whimpered in confession, But I ain't hard, Mr. Max. I ain't hard even a little bit.... He rose to his feet. But.... I-I won't be crying none when they take me to that chair. But I'll b-b-be feeling inside of me like I was crying.... I'll be feeling and thinking that they didn't see me and I didn't see them....

She twisted from him and ran, nude, to the opposite wall. When he came at her this time §he screamed again and ran into the kitchen. She flicked on the light and stood nude amid the white refrigerator, the white gas stove, the gleaming sink, the white-topped table.

Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the death of a man I knew. I did not search for a job that day; I returned home

As long as he could remember, he had never been responsible to anyone. The moment a situation became so that it exacted something of him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared.   Outside

It was fear that had made him fight Gus in the poolroom. If he had felt certain of himself and of Gus, he would not have fought.

To ask a writer to deny the validity of his sensual perceptions is to ask him to be 'expedient' enough to commit spiritual suicide for the sake of politicians … My task is to weigh the effects of our civilization upon the personality, as it affects it here and now. If, in my weighing of those effects, I reveal rot, pus, filth, hate, fear, guilt, and degenerate forms of life, must I be consigned to hell?" Richard Wright, author Native Son

This is life, new and strange; strange, because we fear it; new, because we have kept our eyes turned from it. This is life lived in cramped limits and expressing itself not in terms of our good and bad, but in terms of its own fulfilment. Men are men and life is life, and we must deal with them as they are; and if we want to change them, we must deal with them in the form in which they exist and have their being.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.

threats of war can frighten into submission no one who is determined to resist. They can only place the threat-makers in a more isolated and confused position.