“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
—- FDR – First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

“One of the things which danger does to you after a time is -, well, to kill emotion. I don’t think I shall ever feel anything again except fear. None of us can hate anymore – or love.”
—- Graham Greene – The Confidential Agent (1939)“What are fears but voices airy?
Whispering harm where harm is not.
And deluding the unwary
Till the fatal bolt is shot!”
—- Wordsworth

“Fear – jealousy – money – revenge – and protecting someone you love.”
—- Frederick Knott – Max Halliday, listing the five important motives for murder, Dial M for Murder (1952)

“What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!”
—- Will – Sonnets

“Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake.”
—- Edgar Wallace – The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1916)

“- Tush! Tush! Fear little boys with bugs.”
—- Will – The Taming of the Shrew

“All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears–of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, or speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words “Some Assembly Required.”
—- Dave Barry

“Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid. What sane man is not?”
—- Luciano Pavarotti

“Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.”
—- German Proverb

“Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark.”
—- Francis Bacon


“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
— H.P. Lovecraft

“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”
—- Coleridge

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
— Frank Herbert, Dune – Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

“A man who has been in danger,
When he comes out of it forgets his fears,
And sometimes he forgets his promises.”
—- Euripides – Iphigenia in Tauris (414-12 BC) “He either fears his fate too much,Or his deserts are small,
That puts it not unto the touch
To win or lose it all”
—- James Graham – Marquis of Montrose

“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been my senses would have cool’d
To hear a night shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in’t. I have supp’d full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.”
—- Will – Macbeth “Being frightened is an experience you can’t buy.”—- Anthony Price – Sion Crossing (1984) “What we fear comes to pass more speedily than what we hope.”—- Publilius Syrus – Moral Sayings (1st C B.C.) “Solitude scares me. It makes me think about love, death, and war. I need distraction from anxious, black thoughts.”

—- Brigitte Bardot “Why are we scared to die? Do any of us remember being scared when we were born?”

—- Trevor Kay “A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.”

—- Edgar Watson Howe – Country Town Sayings (1911) Courage is not the lack of fear but the ability to face it.”

—- Lt. John B. Putnam Jr. (1921-1944)