Fear

"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable."

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."

"[Y]ou get used to everything. No human force, not even fear, is stronger than habit."

"Never fear your, enemies. A bold fight is the best: we should advance, and not retrograde."

"Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?… Only in true surrender to the interest of all can we reach that strength and independence, that unity of purpose, that equity of judgment which are necessary if we are to measure up to our duty to the future, as men of a generation to whom the chance was given to build in time a world of peace."

"Some men sleep with loose hands that by day are fists holding fear"

"Emotions prepare us for action. They motivate seeking out rewarding stimuli, increasing alert-ness and avoiding threat (Bernhardt and Singer, 2012). Fear has a strong developmental and evolu-tionary function as a primordial reaction to danger that elicits a distinctive physiological and psycho-logical response. The endocrine system releases epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol that excites the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, and releases glucose into the bloodstream, preparing the body for physical action (Rodrigues et al., 2009). A concomitant increase in attentional vigilance (Fi-nucane, 2011) and a bias toward threatening stimuli (Öhman et al., 2001) serve to heighten perceptual awareness, and learning/memory mechanisms (Öhman and Mineka, 2001). Fear is associated with changes in both the central and peripheral nervous system (Ekman, 1992; Kreibig, 2010; Nummenmaa and Saarimäki, 2017; Panksepp, 1982) and is also characterized by an idiosyncratic subjective experi-ence (Nummenmaa et al., 2014a, Nummenmaa et al., 2014b; Nummenmaa et al., 2018b, Nummenmaa et al., 2018a; Volynets et al., 2019) and overt expression (Smith et al., 2005)."

"Acute fear in response to encountering threat is associated with a distinctive pattern of neural activity distributed through the cerebellum (Ploghaus et al., 1999), limbic system (Knight et al., 2004; LaBar et al., 1998), and cortex (prefrontal: Phelps, Delgado, Nearing and LeDoux, 2004; sensory: Morris et al., 2001; cingulate: Milad et al., 2007; insula: Critchley et al., 2002; motor: Lissek et al., 2014). This dis-tributed network (Saarimäki et al., 2016) enables the rapid detection and appraisal of threat, its saliency to oneself, the employment of executive functioning and memory for decision making and action plan-ning, and the implementation of action plans (Zhu and Thagard, 2002). In addition to generating immediate survival responses, fear systems also modulate vigilance in anticipation of threat caused by environmental cues, perceptual uncertainty, and ambiguity that elicits a sustained fear prior to actual encountering of threat (Fanselow, 1994; Lang et al., 2000; Lehne and Koelsch, 2015). This gives rise to subjective feelings of anxiety, tension, suspense, dread, or foreboding that reflects a generalized antici-patory preparedness for the possibility of potential danger. Several recent studies have shown that spa-tiotemporally distant threats elicit activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cor-tex, hippocampus and amygdala, which are associated with a cognitive mechanism of fear that reflects the need for complex information processing and memory retrieval to generate an adaptive and flexible response. A threat that is proximal in space or time, on the other hand, elicits a reactive fear response of immediate action and fight or flight, and which elicits activity in the periaqueductal gray, amygdala, hypothalamus, and middle cingulate cortex (Mobbs et al., 2007; Qi et al., 2018)."

""I do not wish to experience that again.” “Some people claim that the occasional exposure to fear enhances their enjoyment of more tranquil circumstances." "Some people ought to be confined for their own good," my assistant said, “and to prevent them from spreading dangerous inanities.”"

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

"When the attendant of the man of the true God rose early and went outside, he saw that an army with horses and war chariots was surrounding the city. At once the attendant said to him: “Alas, my master! What are we to do?” But he said: “Do not be afraid! For there are more who are with us than those who are with them.”"

"Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear."

"φόβος οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ, ἀλλ’ ἡ τελεία ἀγάπη ἔξω βάλλει τὸν φόβον, ὅτι ὁ φόβος κόλασιν ἔχει, ὁ δὲ φοβούμενος οὐ τετελείωται ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ."

"Don’t be afraid, my Lord. My father always says that fear is the devil’s hairbrush, although no one knows quite what he means by it."

"Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

"We have genuflected before the God of Science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate."

"I'd rather be dead than afraid."

"Still...let's talk about fear. We won't raise our voices and we won't scream; we'll talk rationally, you and I. We'll talk about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness."

"Fear is an emotion that makes us blind. How many things are we afraid of? We're afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet. We're afraid to stick a knife into the toaster to get the stuck English muffin without unpluggin it first. We're afraid of what the doctor may tell us when the physical exam is over; when the airplane suddenly takes a great unearthly lurch in midair. We're afraid that the oil may run out, that the good air will run out, the good water, the good life. When the daughter promised to be in by eleven and it's now quarter past twelve and sleet is spatting against the window like dry sand, we sit and pretend to watch Johnny Carson and look occasionally at the mute telephone and we feel the emotion that makes us blind, the emotion that makes a stealthy ruin of the thinking process."

"Fear makes us blind, and we touch each fear with all the avid curiousity of self-interest, trying to make a whole out of a hundred parts, like the blind men with their elephant. We sense the shape. Children grasp it easily, forget it, and relearn it as adults. The shape is there, and most of us come to realize what it is sooner or later: it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear - an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We're afraid of the body under the sheet. It's our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths."

"I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants … Fear implies respect."

"After I have conferred my power on the warrior, when he goes to war he knows no fear, he knows no faltering."

"Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully."

"I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are."

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

"They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak."

"Fear. Fear attracts the fearful. The strong. The weak. The innocent. The corrupt. Fear. Fear is my ally."

"Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."

"Alike were they free from Fear, that reigns with the tyrant, and envy, the vice of republics."

"We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women."

"The knowledge of fear can help make us free."

"For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true."

"fear kills, and joy maintains life."

"From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved."

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."

"Yearning conquers fear."

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life."

"There's no shame in fear, my father told me, what matters is how we face it."

"To use fear as the friend it is, we must retrain and reprogram ourselves… We must persistently and convincingly tell ourselves that the fear is here--with its gift of energy and heightened awareness--so we can do our best and learn the most in the new situation."

"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's goodbye to the Bill of Rights."

"C'est de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur."

"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we… remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment unpopular."

"There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor's yard and stampedes us to burn down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong."