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Fear is the mother of all gods. Nature does all things spontaneously by herself without their meddling. Lucretius
As well as being man-made, it’s fear-made ... At its worse it’s the undeveloped part of the psyche that leads to totalitarianism that wants to worship, that wants a boss. That wants a celestial dictatorship. Christopher Hitchens v Rabbi David Wolpe, Boston 2010
Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there’s nothing to be afraid of, I won’t know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn’t something to be afraid of, it’s something to be terrified of. Christopher Hitchens
Fear believes – courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays – courage stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism – courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion, courage is science. Robert G Ingersol
First, it is important to recognize of these theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear. The desire to define doctrines, erect barriers, establish borders, and segregate the faithful in a sacred enclave where the law is stringently observed springs from that terror of extinction which has made all fundamentalists, at one time or another, believe that the secularists were about to wipe them out. The modern world, which seems so exciting to a liberal, seems Godless, drained of meaning, and even satanic to a fundamentalist. If a patient brought such paranoid, conspiracy-laden, and vengeful fantasies to a therapist, he or she would undoubtedly be diagnosed as disturbed. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God p368
Twenty times in the course of my late readings, have I been on the point of breaking out, ‘This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it!’ ... This world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company – I mean hell. So far from believing in the total and universal depravity of human nature, I believe there is no individual totally depraved. The most abandoned scoundrel that ever existed never wholly extinguished his conscience, and while conscience remains there is some religion. Popes, Jesuits, Sarbonnists, and Inquisitors have some religion. Fears and terrors appear to have produced a universal credulity – but fears of pain and death here do not seem so unconquerable as fears of what is to come hereafter. John Adams
Tell proud Jove,
Between his power and thine there is no odds:
’Twas only fear first in the world made gods. Ben Jonson, Sejanus, 1603
Perhaps life is just that ... a dream and a fear. Joseph Conrad
How does one kill fear, I wonder? Joseph Conrad
Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I’m too afraid to and have to eat it anyway. Martin Amis, Other People
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr 10th August 1787
The attack on evolution in this country at least and I think elsewhere is based on a fundamental fear of science. A fear that science is immoral because it doesn’t explicitly mention God. Professor Lawrence Krauss
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Marie Curie, attributed & disputed
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. Albert Einstein
Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more than King. John Milton, Paradise Regain’d, Book II 466-467
The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell’s 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface.
Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars. Paul Joseph Watson
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
Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man’s self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man. Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear
‘I would love to live in a country where the government fears its citizens and not the other way around.’ Storyville: How Hacking Changed the World, BBC 2013
Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear,
To be we know not what we know not where. John Dryden, 1631-1700
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. Eleanor Roosevelt
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. Mark Twain, attributed and unsourced, cited Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. Mark Twain
Courage is not the lack of fear, it is acting in spite of it. Mark Twain
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. Ambrose Redmoon
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. Nelson Mandela
Since I am an immature and wicked man war and unrest appeal to me more than good Bourgeois order. Brutality is respected. The people need wholesome fear. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them. And make them shudderingly submissive. Captain Ernst Rohm