fear
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘fear’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out – while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.” -Harry Browne
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“Hey, we all have our fear. Mine is bugs and lobsters!” -Brooke Burke
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“The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.” -Alexander Payne
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“Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.” -Stanislav Grof
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“I live my life through fear. If I’m afraid of it I’ll do it just so I’m not afraid of it anymore.” -Jeremy Renner
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“You’re not human if you don’t feel fear. But I’ve learnt to treat fear as an emotion that sharpens me. It’s there to give me that edge for what I have to do.” -Bear Grylls
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“I talk to women’s groups all over the country and see women struggling with this. The fear of not being accepted, of being different, of not having a man, all make it hard for a woman to do what she really believes is right for her.” -Olympia Dukakis
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“I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.” -Manuel Puig
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“Who sows fear, reaps weapons.” -Friedrich Durrenmatt
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“Discipline strengthens the mind so that it becomes impervious to the corroding influence of fear.” -Bernard Law Montgomery
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“It is because I believe that it is in the power of such nations to lead the world back into the paths of peace that I propose to devote myself to explaining what, in my opinion, can and should be done to banish the fear of war that hangs so heavily over the world.” -Arthur…
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“Terrorism is a psychological warfare. Terrorists try to manipulate us and change our behavior by creating fear, uncertainty, and division in society.” -Patrick J. Kennedy
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“I didn’t want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn’t want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.” -Lionel Blue
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“Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace.” -Julien Benda
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“Democracy is stronger than terrorism, and we will not cower to the terrorists’ campaign of fear.” -John Doolittle
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“I live in a kind of controlled awareness. I wouldn’t call it fear, but it’s an awareness. I know I have a responsibility to behave in a certain way. I’m able to do that.” -Mary Tyler Moore
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“I fear that the rising personal bankruptcies and repossessions are the first signs of bigger problems to come and personal debt – Gordon Brown’s legacy to millions of Britain’s families – will hang like a millstone around the neck of the British people for years to come.” -Vince Cable
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“There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.” -Charles de Montesquieu
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“A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.” -Roald Dahl
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“I think we have lost our groove as a country. One of the reasons was the attack on 9/11. We got knocked off our game. From a country that always exported hope we went into the business of exporting fear.” -Thomas Friedman
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“The injury that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.” -Steve Perry
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“I have now taken a serious task upon myself and I fear a greater one that is in the power of any man to perform in the given time-but it is too late to go back.” -Eli Whitney
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“Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.” -W. Edwards Deming
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“All the times I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of a show that’s actually gotten on the air, it’s always that same mixture of excitement and utter fear.” -J. J. Abrams
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“We have not sought this conflict we have sought too long to avoid it our forbearance has been construed into weakness, our magnanimity into fear, until the vindication of our manhood, as well as the defence of our rights, is required at our hands.” -Robert Toombs
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“There are no guarantees. From the viewpoint of fear, none are strong enough. From the viewpoint of love, none are necessary.” -Emmanuel Teney
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“Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather that it shall never have a beginning.” -John Henry Newman
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“He doesn’t know the meaning of the word fear, but then again he doesn’t know the meaning of most words.” -Bobby Bowden
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“People have a fear of the unknown. Insects have different senses than us, different amount of limbs and their body structure is very different. It’s hard for us to really relate to them and understand them.” -Dominic Monaghan
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“I fear that our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy about the failure to destroy Al Qaeda and about revenge.” -Dave Matthews
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“With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.” -Federico Garcia Lorca
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“There are only three sins – causing pain, causing fear, and causing anguish. The rest is window dressing.” -Roger Caras
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“I thought Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying was one of the biggest pieces of crap that I’ve ever read in my life.” -Helen Reddy
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“In the ’80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear – that if I didn’t, people would soon forget about me.” -Al Yankovic
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“Somehow we can’t live outside the politics of race. There’s something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.” -Anna Deavere Smith
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“That might have a lot to do with it, but you know, I probably don’t show fear, but I suffer from fear like everyone else.” -Steve Irwin
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“You always have this fear in a movie of just being somebody’s woman.” -Charlize Theron
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“Perhaps we don’t need these religious concoctions to pillow the fear of death. Just the fact that there is an unknown, and something greater, can bring a feeling of peace. That’s enough for me.” -Brad Pitt
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“Honest to God, all my life I have had such a fear of spiders. In fact, I use to have a reoccurring dream about one. Very clearly, it was black with a red head. It would sit up in the corner of the bedroom and when it started getting closer, I would wake up in…
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“You have to have fear to take risks – and I want to at least try.” -Seann William Scott
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“As with most phobias, the fear of flying does make some sense, but if ever there was a fear worth quashing then this is it. After all, life is short, and there’s a great big world to explore out there.” -Beth Ditto
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“You can’t operate a company by fear, because the way to eliminate fear is to avoid criticism. And the way to avoid criticism is to do nothing.” -Steve Ross
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“I always have the fear that, if I don’t commit 100 percent to my work, then it’s gonna suffer.” -Joaquin Phoenix
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“I’d gone from being this art student messing about with music to this girl with a record deal, magazine front covers and all this hype. In many ways, it was everything I ever wanted, but when it happened all I felt was total, paralysing fear.” -Florence Welch
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“Why do people do things that they fear? It may be that the fear contains information. Something can be interesting if you get to the other side of that fear.” -Craig Ferguson
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“Fear and pain and suffering is not OK for any being to feel intentionally at the hands of us.” -Leona Lewis
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“My fear is that, as soon as I get married and have kids that I’ll kind of do what a lot of people do and suddenly start making, ‘Now I’m gonna make films for kids.’ I really hope I don’t do that.” -Trey Parker
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“Freedom is contagious. That’s why despots fear it so much.” -Bill Owens
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“I began to fear that Mos Def was being treated as a product, not a person, so I’ve been going by Yasiin since ’99. At first it was just for friends and family, but now I’m declaring it openly.” -Mos Def
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“I find writing very difficult. It’s hard and it hurts sometimes, and it’s scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.” -Tony Kushner
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“The thing about Republicans is that they don’t care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.” -Jane Smiley
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“If you have stage fright, it never goes away. But then I wonder: is the key to that magical performance because of the fear?” -Stevie Nicks
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“What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.” -J. G. Ballard
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“I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.” -A. N. Wilson
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“What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness – a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren’t possible, better that there at least be some reward for…
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“Less base the fear of death than fear of life.” -Edward Young
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“I call on the Iranian people: it is not too late to replace the corrupt regime and return to your glorious Persian heritage, a heritage of culture and values and not of bombs and missiles… How can a nation allow a regime to instill fear, take away the people’s freedom and shock the young generation…
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“Fear not and the God of mercies grant a full gale and a fair entry into His kingdom, which may carry sweetly and swiftly over the bar, that you find not the rub of death.” -Donald Cargill
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“I don’t have a fear of flying I have a fear of crashing.” -Billy Bob Thornton
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“On the one hand Twitter gives you the opportunity to engage with people, which is great, but on the other there are people who feel they can say whatever they want, put poison out there, really, without fear of any repercussions.” -Michael Sheen
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“Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.” -Gouverneur Morris
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“Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government.” -Wendell Phillips
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“For me it’s important to be in balance. To not let fear get in the way of things, to not worry so much about protecting yourself all the time.” -John Frusciante
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“We are near, very near, to an end to the eurozone crisis… The worst – in the sense of the fear of the eurozone breaking up – is over. But the best isn’t there yet.” -Francois Hollande
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“As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.” -Cyril Connolly
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“The universal human laws – need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain – are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.” -George Saunders
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“Over the past few years, the road to confrontation has shown its consequences: loss of innocent lives, destruction and fear. Most costly, however, was the loss of hope. The most precious gift that you can present to your peoples over the coming weeks is renewed hope born out of tangible progress on the ground.” -King…
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“I fear God never showed mercy to one so vile as I.” -David Brainerd
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“Most of us harbour a significant amount of subconscious fear about death, and act out of this fear in our daily lives.” -Christy Turlington
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“There’s a confidence that comes from youth and not knowing better. But there comes a point, as an actor, when you do know better, and that is when the fear starts.” -Kiefer Sutherland
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“My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.” -Andrew Cuomo
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“Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic, and lies surrounded me.” -Ryan White
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“The regrets of yesterday and the fear of tomorrow can kill you.” -Liza Minnelli
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“Fear of the future is worse than one’s present fortune.” -Quintilian
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“Most fear stems from sin to limit one’s sins, one must assuredly limit one’s fear, thereby bringing more peace to one’s spirit.” -Marvin Gaye
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“I’d rather be two strokes ahead going into the last day than two strokes behind. Having said that, it’s probably easier to win coming from behind. There is no fear in chasing. There is fear in being chased.” -Jack Nicklaus
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“Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.” -Virgil Thomson
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“You know I never used to be a bad flyer, but I did start to have a fear of flying after I shot a movie where I was terrorized on a plane. I made Wes Craven’s ‘Red Eye’. I don’t think they’re linked but it does make me pause and wonder if they are, so…
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“Well, I am now convinced there is no kind of fear or anxiety anyone has to live with.” -Ricky Williams
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“In an ecology of love, people can relate in trust and face the future without fear. They do not need to play it safe. They can take uncertainty in their stride.” -Jonathan Sacks
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“Fear of failure has always been my best motivator.” -Douglas Wood
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“My fear now is of cliche, of complacency, of not being able to feel authenticity in myself and those around me.” -John Hawkes
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“I had a constant fear, a constant little doubt in my mind: ‘OK, I’m getting ready to do my standing back full on beam and I might re-tear my ACL.’” -Shawn Johnson
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“Mine are the deep-seated fears established when we are children, and they never quite go away: the fear of being helpless, the fear of being trapped, the fear of being out of control.” -Virginia C. Andrews
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“I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I’m not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.” -Harlan Coben
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“At first I wasn’t sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.” -Gordon Parks
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“It may be you fear more to deliver judgment upon me than I fear judgment.” -Giordano Bruno
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“God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear.” -Ruby Dee
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“Fear was absolutely necessary. Without it, I would have been scared to death.” -Floyd Patterson
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“A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I’ve seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I’ve never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That’s amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that’s being taken…
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“I am consumed with the fear of failing. Reaching deep down and finding confidence has made all my dreams come true.” -Arsenio Hall
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“The greatest fear that haunts this city is a suitcase bomb, nuclear or germ. Many people carry small gas masks. The masses here seem to be resigned to the inevitable, believing an attack of major proportions will happen.” -David Wilkerson
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“The Feminist Me says that a woman’s right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps.” -Julie Burchill
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“Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.” -Jeffrey Sachs
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“So here we are today with a new conversation. When University of Georgia plays Georgia Tech, it’s uniform color versus skin color. We have – we’ve overcome that level of racial fear.” -Jesse Jackson
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“Not a few other very eminent and scholarly men made the same request, urging that I should no longer through fear refuse to give out my work for the common benefit of students of Mathematics.” -Nicolaus Copernicus
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“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.” -Salman Rushdie
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“To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity.” -Steven Brust
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“Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith. For without fear of the devil there is no need for God.” -Sean Connery
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“President Obama is doing the right thing by offering young immigrants, most often in this country through no action of their own, a chance to live and work openly, free from the fear of deportation.” -Eliot Spitzer
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“You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it’s not a natural drive – it’s born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood.” -Gabrielle Union
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“Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully – love, lust, longing joy, rage, fear triumph, yearning and confusion.” -Tony Snow
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“I definitely think cheerleaders have no fear.” -Ashley Tisdale
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“Although I am deeply grateful to a great many people, I forgo the temptation of naming them for fear that I might slight any by omission.” -Theodore Bikel
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“I don’t believe in fear – I live my life without regrets.” -Puff Daddy
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“I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I’m always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!” -Camille Pissarro
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“Fear, anxiety and neurosis: that’s just in the suitcase when you’re an actor.” -Laura Linney
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“Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.” -Vita Sackville-West
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“I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying.” -Sara Blakely
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“I think it is important to ask ourselves as citizens, not as Democrats attacking the administration, but as citizens, whether a world power can really provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety?” -Zbigniew Brzezinski
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“In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.” -Anna Jameson
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“Anger elicits anger, fear elicits fear, no matter how well meaning we may be.” -Martha Beck
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“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.” -Jean Baudrillard
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“My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall – what’s going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.” -Jonathan…
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“Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.” -Mary Baker Eddy
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“Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.” -Marilyn French
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“Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes.” -Maggie Kuhn
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“A child’s fear is a world whose dark corners are quite unknown to grownup people it has its sky and its abysses, a sky without stars, abysses into which no light can ever penetrate.” -Julien Green
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“Fear rules almost every newsroom in the country.” -Dan Rather
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“Only a fool does not fear actors, but you can’t beat them, and if you can’t beat them, join them, as they say. As I’ve got older I’ve become very interested in that part of the work.” -Lars von Trier
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“Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.” -Jack Lemmon
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“My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.” -David Mamet
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“Roosevelt’s declaration that Americans had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’ was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.” -Russell Baker
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“I was a postman one Christmas and I developed a morbid fear of dogs.” -Diane Abbott
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“I never discuss a novel while I’m writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.” -Dean Koontz
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“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.” -Susan Sontag
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“The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.” -Twyla Tharp
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“I think people that have fear that, ‘Oh if I have a kid I won’t be able to do this and I won’t be able to do that.’ It’s kind of the opposite. It really gives you energy. It makes people better.” -Anthony Kiedis
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“Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion.” -Kevin Mitnick
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“Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.” -Noam Chomsky
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“Fear is something to be moved through, not something to be turned from.” -Peter McWilliams
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“If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear.” -Ivo Andric
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“I do support artists standing by their beliefs and walking with integrity. We have to find a better way to commercially exploit music while giving artists their proper respect. This cannot be done while taking their contributions for granted or trying to control the scope of their growth and power through threats and fear tactics.”…
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“Uncertainty and fear and ignorance about immigrants, about people who are different, has a history as old as our Nation.” -Luis Gutierrez
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“But I love being scared. I think you’re brave only when you do things that scare you. I’ve always used fear as a motivator. I’m not sure why.” -Ginnifer Goodwin
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“At the time, 1980, people regarded actresses involved with production with a certain amount of fear, resentment and anger.” -Jacqueline Bisset
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“Men do weird things when they experience fear. It’s like a fight-or-flight thing.” -Rashida Jones
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“An appeal to fear never finds an echo in German hearts.” -Otto von Bismarck
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“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” -Joan Didion
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“My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.” -Cornel West
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“Americans are terrified because so many of them have been laid off in recent years and months and they fear that they may be next. Even if they have not been laid off or have not known anyone laid off, they definitely know someone who has lost his home.” -Ben Stein
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“You can’t be a proper comic unless you’ve been out on stage and felt the fear.” -Johnny Vegas
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“A huge part of what animates homophobia among young people is paranoia and fear of their own capacity to be gay themselves.” -Dan Savage
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“Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.” -Lewis Mumford
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“In the ring, I never really knew fear.” -Rocky Marciano
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“When the entertainers of the Right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call ‘the Chicago way.’” -Thomas Frank
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“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.” -James Stephens
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“When I’m acting, I’m two beings. There’s the one monitoring the distance between myself and the camera, making sure I hit my marks, and there is the one driven by this inner fire, this delicious fear.” -Jeanne Moreau
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“We, the people. Manifest Destiny. Conceived in liberty. Fear itself. Ask not. Morning in America. United we stand. Yes, we can. In times of great change and tumult, presidents seek to inspire beleaguered Americans by reminding them of their national identity.” -Ron Fournier
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“Eighty percent of all choices are based on fear. Most people don’t choose what they want they choose what they think is safe.” -Phil McGraw
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“Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason’s imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.” -Louis Aragon
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“We tell lies when we are afraid… afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.” -Tad Williams
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“Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.” -Eugene O’Neill
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“I think I’m a bit less inhibited, and not thinking too much before speaking. It’s not about being shameful, I’m just a bit more unabashedly myself because of this thing, and it probably started at age 15. I can be around people and say what I think without fear.” -Kristen Stewart
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“Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen.” -Pliny the Elder
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“It’s better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.” -Freeman Dyson
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“Dictators and oppressors should continue to fear me because I will be here for a long time.” -Lech Walesa
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“Resist your fear fear will never lead to you a positive end. Go for your faith and what you believe.” -T. D. Jakes
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“When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.” -Margaret J. Wheatley
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“People don’t know where to place me. Terry Gilliam used me as a quirky cop in ‘Twelve Monkeys’, and then he hired me again to be an effeminate hotel clerk in ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’. Another time, I was shooting this indie film ‘The Souler Opposite’ and six days a week, I’m playing…
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“Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.” -Thomas Hobbes
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“He who does not fear death cares naught for threats.” -Pierre Corneille
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“Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?” -Garrett Hardin
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“My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and…
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“I have a big fear of change, or negative change, anyway. I’m basically the same person I was when I won ‘Idol,’ or when I was 10.” -Kelly Clarkson
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“I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow…
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“We must travel in the direction of our fear.” -John Berryman
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“I have a tendency to sabotage relationships I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good-for-nothing thoughts.” -Michael Buble
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“I try to get in quiet time and book time, but really, the only time I ever get that is when I’m on an airplane – I have a fear of flying, but I actually love flying because it’s the only time I can sleep, and it’s the only time I get to read.” -Kesha
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“I define fear as standing across the ring from Joe Louis and knowing he wants to go home early.” -Max Baer
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