Quotes
When a castaway collapses from hunger and thirst it is fear of physical want rather than a real want, they say. Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost.
As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective. (p126)
'I deserve to be thought a coward. I am a coward. I'm just so bloody afraid of dying — of losing —'
“Now you’re scaring me.”
“If you were not scared, you don’t understand the situation.”
p. 590
Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.
p. 56
He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.
p. 129
“Haven’t you ever heard of morale-building?” Khouri had asked.
“Heard of it,” Volyova said. “Don’t happen to agree with it. Would you rather be happy and dead, or scared and alive?”
p. 381
She had almost dared ask, but was perhaps too fearful of hearing something she could not refute.
p. 424
We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.
Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey,a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.
For what can men do when so many have grown lawless? Who can enjoy the lovely land, who can enjoy the seventy years, and the sun that pours down on the earth, when there is fear in the heart? Who can walk quietly in the shadow of the jacarandas, when their beauty is grown to danger? Who can lie peacefully abed, while the darkness holds some secret? What lovers can lie sweetly under the stars, when menace grows with the measure of their seclusion?
