Quotes about fear

A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.

A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it. Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate. All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.

“It’s impossible to protect anyone completely without enslaving them. I think that’s something you’ve never understood because you’ve always demanded too much of yourself. You blame yourself for your sister’s death—”

“I didn’t watch her carefully enough.”

“What could you have done? Remember her life, not her death. She was brave and happy and arrogant, the way a child should be. You could only protect her more by chaining her to you with fear. She couldn’t live that way, not and remain the person you loved.”

The plague came to be called Yellow Mantle. Men must name everything, as if, by giving it a name, they will decrease the nameless horror they experience.

Odd, how different different men’s fears could be.

All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

Fear requires a desire to exist in the future.

Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.

Nature gives us... passions and desires suitable to our present state. We are only troubled by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves...

Strangely, although the world is already full of fearful things, mortals seems always to hunt for new worries.

Fear goes where it is invited.

"That's what courage is. If she weren't scared, she wouldn't need courage in the first place."