Quotes About Hysteria

Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. "Falsehood flies," observed Jonathan Swift, "and the truth comes limping after it." McCarthy's career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause.

He'd complained to his doctor. "The beta-blockers are blocking my memories!" Juan Diego cried. "They are stealing my childhood—they are robbing my dreams!" To his doctor, all this hysteria meant was that Juan Diego missed the kick his adrenaline gave him. (Beta-blockers really do a number on your adrenaline.)

As with Three Mile Island, the hysteria of the media and the political class over the Deepwater spill is likely to lead to increased risk and adverse environmental tradeoffs.

What did religion do to people, to provoke such obstinancy, such hysteria - how did it push people to the stage of torturing themselves and killing each other?

When he first got the job with Kate, Joe looked for the weaknesses on which he lived—vanity, voluptuousness, anxiety or conscience, greed, hysteria. He knew they were there because she was a woman.

This must be madness!

As historian Johanna Fernández writes in a study co-authored with political prisoner Abu-Jamal, "The deployment of hysteria around the issue of crime and the association of crime with black rebellion helped consolidate public support for legislation designed to suppress political dissent."[18]

At the end, excitement maintained its hysteria.

The fear syndrome [a species of propaganda], by exaggerating Vietcong power for destruction, misplaces the real pain of the real war, and is immensely dangerous. It leads to hysteria, to hawk-demands for a bigger war; it pushes us nearer and nearer to World War Three. The fear syndrome in no way serves the American cause; it can only jeopardize more American lives, with the ultimate risk of jeopardizing all life.

The fury began before she was old enough to give it a name. When she arrived at the hospital, dragged through the door into the red era of soul science, her fury was called hysteria, as if it had nothing to do with her, and she became we. and we became the disease that said we wanted to steal, to falsely accuse, to set things on fire. Fine, let it burn.

On the other hand, constant hysteria did have one unintended political virtue. If every new event canceled out every other event, like some wacky news-cycle pyramid scheme, then you always survived another day.

He knew now what this thing was — hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is . . . a world of doorknobs. He wondered if hysteria were really too steep a price to pay for bringing it to life.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

In extreme form, stress can cause symptoms of conversion hysteria—a malaise described by Jean Charcot, Freud's teacher.

The first published discussion of it of any length was by Breuer (in semi-physiological terms) in his theoretical part of the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895). He there defines it as 'the tendency to keep intracerebral excitation constant.

It was about the hysteria, the mythmaking, and the misunderstanding that had twisted

Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

In fact, because of this deep desire for peace, the ruling class leaders of this land, from 1945 on, stepped up the hysteria and propaganda to drive into American minds the false notion that danger threatened them from the East.

Can you trust the crew in the V-wings?" A laugh slipped through Belkor's teeth, and he heard the hysteria in it. "To kill Mors? Yes. I've made her out as the traitor who brought down the Perilous. But to kill Vader and the Emperor? No. To help Twi'lek terrorists? No, I can't trust them to do that, Syndulla. No.

Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it.