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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“Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we’re going to win.” -Kevin O’Leary
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“Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.” -Mary Catherine Bateson
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“Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.” -Grace Paley
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“My main concern with the condition of mathematics in high school is that there’s a lot of fear involved! Math is not, generally speaking, presented in a fun way. The concepts, as I see them, are fun, and that’s the way I’d like to convey them myself.” -Danica McKellar
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“You always fear when you’re making a movie that has a moral to the story that people are going to reject the idea of being taught a lesson.” -Christina Ricci
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“To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action, when there’s more reason to fear than to hope.” -Miguel de Cervantes
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“You cannot avoid war in life, you cannot avoid the fear of terrorism, you cannot avoid those things now, they are a part of everyday demeanor.” -John Mayer
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“Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they’ve got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I’m supposed to be more revealing than I’ve been, and to me it just sounds like something…
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“I won’t allow myself to have tremendous fear.” -Calvin Klein
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“Any fear of aging, I think, is simply vanity.” -Leighton Meester
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“Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.” -Milan Kundera
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“I fear God and next to God I mostly fear them that fear him not.” -Saadi
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“Some people need to stay at the top. They are afraid to re-start from zero because they fear the critics.” -Eric Cantona
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“There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.” -Ben Jonson
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“We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.” -Kevin Costner
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“Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.” -David Ben-Gurion
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“A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public well has nothing to fear from the competition.” -James Cash Penney
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“You can ask me pretty much anything. There’ll be things I’ll go, ‘That feels a little too personal.’ But most things I don’t have a fear of being asked about.” -Nicole Kidman
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“Fear is a very explosive emotion, but it has a short life span. It’s the sprint. The marathon is hope.” -Mike Huckabee
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“The record company’s worst fear is that you’ll fall in love or get rich.” -Maynard James Keenan
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“A star on a movie set is like a time bomb. That bomb has got to be defused so people can approach it without fear.” -Jack Nicholson
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“I’ve probably earned the right to screw up a few times. I don’t want the fear of failure to stop me from doing what I really care about.” -Emma Watson
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“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.” -Edward P. Morgan
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“I spoke without fear of contradiction. I simply did not suffer self-doubt.” -Elia Kazan
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“There’s an honesty in our family – my kids and I are able to talk about things without me putting the fear of God into them.” -Billie Joe Armstrong
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“Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.” -Samuel Ullman
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“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” -Alfred Eisenstaedt
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“There is perhaps nothing so bad and so dangerous in life as fear.” -Jawaharlal Nehru
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“The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.” -Adam Smith
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“He who doesn’t fear death dies only once.” -Giovanni Falcone
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“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.” -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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“I think when you move past your fear and you go after your dreams wholeheartedly, you become free.” -LL Cool J
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“My whole life I’ve had the fear that I was going to be abandoned.” -Halle Berry
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“I think one of the terrible things today is that people have this deathly fear of food: fear of eggs, say, or fear of butter. Most doctors feel that you can have a little bit of everything.” -Julia Child
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“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” -Shirley MacLaine
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“There’s no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively – I am one with the people.” -Huey Newton
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“Death in itself is nothing but we fear to be we know not what, we know not where.” -John Dryden
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“We should laugh before being happy, for fear of dying without having laughed.” -Jean de la Bruyere
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“Love, hope, fear, faith – these make humanity These are its sign and note and character.” -Robert Browning
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“And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me.” -Black Elk
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“I’ve always had a huge fear of dying or becoming ill. The thing I’m most afraid of, though, is being alone, which I think a lot of performers fear. It’s why we seek the limelight – so we’re not alone, were adored. We’re loved, so people want to be around us. The fear of being…
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“You have to be careful not to let your fear stop you doing things. It’s very exciting to test yourself.” -Francesca Annis
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“Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves – regret for the past and fear of the future.” -Fulton Oursler
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“A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear.” -Herb Kelleher
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“Those who love to be feared fear to be loved.” -Saint Francis de Sales
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“Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation.” -Vannevar Bush
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“I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.” -David Byrne
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“The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.” -William Lyon Phelps
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“It is a measure of the framers’ fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.” -Sandra Day O’Connor
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“‘Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.” -Dag Hammarskjold
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“I have always been aware that you have to get people listening before you can change their minds. Any artist’s big fear is being ignored, so if you get debate, that’s great.” -Damien Hirst
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“How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?” -Joseph Conrad
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“My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.” -William Tecumseh Sherman
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“Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?” -Emile M. Cioran
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“I do not trust those who make the vaccines, or the apparatus behind it all to push it on us through fear.” -Billy Corgan
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“I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that’s becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.” -Bell Hooks
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“I was probably more scared of my high school exams than I was of the Oscars. At the time you think it’s everything and if you don’t do well, your life’s over. Opportunities are gone. So the more you do it, the less the fear is present.” -Hugh Jackman
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“Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.” -Madame de Stael
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“You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.” -Sammy Davis, Jr.
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“What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.” -Isabel Allende
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“Right out of high school I never had the fear of getting beat, which is how most people lose.” -Dan Gable
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“The abandoned infant’s cry is rage, not fear.” -Robert Anton Wilson
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“Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman.” -Marian Anderson
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“It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.” -T. E. Lawrence
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“There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized.” -Conan O’Brien
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“I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.” -Joe Biden
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“We should face reality and our past mistakes in an honest, adult way. Boasting of glory does not make glory, and singing in the dark does not dispel fear.” -King Hussein
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“Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.” -Umberto Eco
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“Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves. A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share of it in another.” -Lord Chesterfield
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“We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.” -Jean de La Fontaine
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“In the company of the accomplished, people hope it will rub off on themselves, in the company of the misfortunate, they fear it!” -Bryant H. McGill
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“The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.” -Elias Canetti
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“I don’t know how it is for women or for other guys, but when I was young and in my 20s, I had a fear of marriage.” -Jeff Bridges
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“Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can’t do, fear or even disgust at growing old.” -Rowan Williams
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“Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise.” -Henry A. Wallace
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“Don’t fear change – embrace it.” -Anthony J. D’Angelo
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“Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies’ resources, and minimized their own.” -Titus Livius
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“Do we fear terrorism so much that we throw out our Constitution, and are we unwilling and afraid to debate our Constitution?” -Rand Paul
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“Action cures fear, inaction creates terror.” -Douglas Horton
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“I have no fear of death. More important, I don’t fear life.” -Steven Seagal
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“Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama’s Waterloo.” -Camille Paglia
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“Audacity augments courage hesitation, fear.” -Publilius Syrus
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“I have this fear of falling in front of large groups of people. That’s why I tend not to wear heels.” -Taylor Swift
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“Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” -Louis D. Brandeis
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“Humility is a great quality of leadership which derives respect and not just fear or hatred.” -Yousef Munayyer
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“No person who is enthusiastic about his work has anything to fear from life.” -Samuel Goldwyn
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“If you have an issue with homosexuality, then it comes to your own fear and your own darkness.” -Tori Amos
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“I think ‘Dilbert’ will remain popular as long as employees are frustrated and they fear the consequences of complaining too loudly. ‘Dilbert’ is the designated voice of discontent for the workplace. I never planned it that way. It just happened.” -Scott Adams
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“No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.” -Eugene Ionesco
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“Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.” -Gerald Jampolsky
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“I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.” -James Joyce
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“Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear.” -Horace Mann
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“I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free.” -Nikos Kazantzakis
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“When someone says that I’m angry it’s actually a compliment. I have not always been direct with my anger in my relationships, which is part of why I’d write about it in my songs because I had such fear around expressing anger as a woman.” -Alanis Morissette
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“Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.” -Andrew Jackson
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“To have a great man for an intimate friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it those who have, fear it.” -Homer
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“A fear of the unknown keeps a lot of people from leaving bad situations.” -Kathie Lee Gifford
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“Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers’ incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?” -Anna Quindlen
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“The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.” -Clarence Darrow
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“No one should have to choose between medicine and other necessities. No one should have to use the emergency room every time a child gets sick. And no one should have to live in constant fear that a medical problem will become a financial crisis.” -Brad Henry
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“It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldn’t have it, to fear and suspect the worst.” -Desiderius Erasmus
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“So the Marine Corps really did teach me to conquer fear, and then to go for higher causes, higher purposes.” -Robert Kiyosaki
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“Young players need freedom of expression to develop as creative players… they should be encouraged to try skills without fear of failure.” -Arsene Wenger
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“Jealousy is the fear or apprehension of superiority: envy our uneasiness under it.” -William Shenstone
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“I just want my family to be safe. Because I am sometimes polarizing, I fear for their safety.” -Lady Gaga
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“To me, my biggest fear is getting a big head, and that is when I get the hammer. Because it’s very easy in this game to believe you’re something special.” -Keith Richards
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“I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we’re lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it’s worse than fear – it’s active disengagement.” -Ken Burns
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“A cheerful frame of mind, reinforced by relaxation… is the medicine that puts all ghosts of fear on the run.” -George Matthew Adams
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“When you are 16 there is no fear whatsoever. As you get older you play in more important games and that is when you start thinking about what will happen if you win or lose.” -Wayne Rooney
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“The Russians feared Ike. They didn’t fear me.” -Lyndon B. Johnson
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“Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong he has a thousand who has overcome it.” -Christian Nestell Bovee
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“It’s not necessary to fear the prospect of failure but to be determined not to fail.” -Jimmy Carter
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“Most men are very attached to the idea of being male, and usually experience a lot of fear and insecurity around the idea of being a man. Most women are very identified with their gender, and also experience a tremendous amount of fear and insecurity.” -Andrew Cohen
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“Fear is the dark room where the Devil develops his negatives.” -Gary Busey
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“A propensity to hope and joy is real riches one to fear and sorrow real poverty.” -David Hume
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“Luck is everything… My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film.” -Alfred Hitchcock
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“Death is not the biggest fear we have our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are.” -Miguel Angel Ruiz
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“People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.” -Doug Coupland
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“I am so tired of fear. And I don’t want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.” -Michelle Obama
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“I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.” -Julia Ward Howe
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“How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.” -George MacDonald
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“I get so nervous on stage I can’t help but talk. I try. I try telling my brain: stop sending words to the mouth. But I get nervous and turn into my grandma. Behind the eyes it’s pure fear. I find it difficult to believe I’m going to be able to deliver.” -Adele
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“The reason most people don’t express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It’s what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.” -David Icke
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“I have accepted fear as a part of life – specifically the fear of change… I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.” -Erica Jong
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“It is a base thing for a man among the people not to obey those in command. Never in a state can the laws be well administered when fear does not stand firm.” -Sophocles
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“But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?” -James Thurber
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“The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear – and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march.” -George W. Bush
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“Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.” -Joseph Joubert
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“To work without attachment is to work without the expectation of reward or fear of any punishment in this world or the next. Work so done is a means to the end, and God is the end.” -Ramakrishna
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“Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity.” -Thomas John Watson, Sr.
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“Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.” -Erik H. Erikson
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“Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.” -Dorothy Day
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“Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.” -Zora Neale Hurston
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“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” -James A. Michener
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“The fear of death comes from limited awareness.” -Deepak Chopra
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“I fear the boredom that comes with not learning and not taking chances.” -Robert Fulghum
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“It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth, in which alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear!” -Anthony de Mello
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“Basically, there are two paths you can walk: faith or fear. It’s impossible to simultaneously trust God and not trust God.” -Charles Stanley
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“A peace that depends on fear is nothing but a suppressed war.” -Henry Van Dyke
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“President Obama clearly cannot run on his record. All he’s offering is more of the same. That’s not good. Look at the economy. It’s stagnating. And so, what they’re now going to try and do is bring this campaign down to little things, distractions, distortions, smear, fear, anger, frustration.” -Paul Ryan
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“Men! The only animal in the world to fear.” -David Herbert Lawrence
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“That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.” -George Santayana
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“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” -Joseph Chilton Pearce
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“The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.” -Joseph Addison
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“Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.” -Merle Shain
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“The secret of life is to have no fear it’s the only way to function.” -Stokely Carmichael
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“Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.” -William Hazlitt
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“It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.” -Herodotus
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“Discipline is based on pride, on meticulous attention to details, and on mutual respect and confidence. Discipline must be a habit so ingrained that it is stronger than the excitement of the goal or the fear of failure.” -Gary Ryan Blair
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“I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young women in public.” -Albert Ellis
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“Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.” -George Sewell
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“For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” -Alexander Pope
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“There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.” -Henry Miller
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“Worry is a cycle of inefficient thoughts whirling around a center of fear.” -Corrie Ten Boom
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“I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don’t think that’s only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings. I think it really exists and is part of the human condition. I think in the course of your life you figure out ways…
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“Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.” -William E. Gladstone
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“Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.” -Mel Brooks
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“I have a lack of fear, whereas in the past the fear of failure was a powerful motivator. Anyway, I have great expectations for the future, but I just don’t know if I’m the monarch of all I survey.” -Sylvester Stallone
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“I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.” -Thomas Huxley
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“No one should fear to undertake any task in the name of our Saviour, if it is just and if the intention is purely for His holy service.” -Christopher Columbus
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“Fear not, we are of the nature of the lion, and cannot descend to the destruction of mice and such small beasts.” -Elizabeth I
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“I don’t run away from a challenge because I am afraid. Instead, I run toward it because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your feet.” -Nadia Comaneci
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“Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.” -Aleister Crowley
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“Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.” -Arnold H. Glasow
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“Cruelty is a tyrant that’s always attended with fear.” -Thomas Fuller
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