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|  Edward Abbey | Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward. | |
| John Adams | Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. | |
| Aeschylus | For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends. | |
| Aesop | Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want. | |
| Jann Arden | The first step to truly living a good and fearless life, is accepting responsibility for your actions. Accepting what part you had in any situation. Difficult, to say the least, but liberating. | |
| Hannah Arendt | The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. | |
| Hannah Arendt | Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor—coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another. | |
| Aristotle | The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless. | |
| Aung San Suu Kyi | The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies. | |
| Walter Bagehot | So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience tells them it is wrong. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. | |
| Dan Baum | The country's first drug ban explicitly targeted the opium of "the heathen Chinee." Cocaine was first banned in the south to prevent an uprising of hopped-up "cocainized Negroes. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Heathen, n. A benighten creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. | |
| Daniel Boorstin | We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant. | |
| William E. Borah | Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees. | |
| James A. C. Brown | There exists a “fear of freedom” of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate. | |
| Sir Thomas Browne | The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority. | |
| Giordano Bruno | It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. | |
| John "Birdman" Bryant | If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave. | |
| Buddha | The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed. | |
| Edmund Burke | No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. | |
| Edmund Burke | The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion. | |
| Edmund Burke | Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. | |
| Robert Burns | Dare to be honest and fear no labor. | |
| George W. Bush | We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans,
and confront the worst threats before they emerge. | |
| George W. Bush | We have every reason to assume the worst. | |
| George W. Bush | Today the Justice Department did issue a blanket alert. It was in recognition of a general threat we received. This is not the first time the Justice Department have acted like this. I hope it is the last. But given the attitude of the evildoers, it may not be. | |
| George W. Bush | We will fight with full force and might of the United States military. | |
| George W. Bush | Saddam Hussein's regime is a gray and gathering danger. | |
| George W. Bush | The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance
in the campaign against terror.
We've removed an ally of al Qaeda. | |
| George W. Bush | And our security will require all Americans
to be forward-looking and resolute,
to be ready for pre-emptive action. | |
| George W. Bush | There will be no going back to the era before September 11th, 2001, to false comfort in a dangerous world. | |
| George W. Bush | Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. | |
| George W. Bush | Our enemies are a radical network of terrorists --
and every government that supports them. | |
| George W. Bush | We're too great a nation to allow the evildoers to affect our soul. | |
| Nicholas Murray Butler | The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously. | |
| Gaius Julius Caesar | Men willingly believe what they wish. | |
| John Cage | I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. | |
| William J. Campbell | Today the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury. | |
| Albert Camus | Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. | |
| Jimmy Carter | If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement. | |
| E. H. Chapin | At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent. | |
| Chinese Proverb | If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others. | |
| Paulo Coelho | The person who is right is the person who is the strongest, in this case, paradoxically, it's the cowards who are the brave ones, and they manage to impose their ideas on everyone else. | |
| Marvin Cooley | We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: “I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.” Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility -- blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Love of justice in the generality of men is only the fear of suffering from injustice. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word. | |
| William O. Douglas | Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin. | |
| Theodore M. Drange | Some methodological atheists formulate the principle by saying that the burden of proof is always on any person making an existence claim, since, from a logical point of view, existence claims are only capable of proof, not disproof. No one has ever proven the nonexistence of Santa Claus, or elves, or unicorns, or anything else, simply because the very logic of an unrestricted existential proposition prohibits its disproof. It is impossible to go all over the universe and show that, for example, there are no elves anywhere. For this reason, rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of all those things which have never been shown to exist. That is why we all regard it rational to deny the existence of Santa Claus, elves, unicorns, etc. And since God is in that same category, having never been shown to exist, it follows that rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of God. | |
| John J. Dunphy | I steadfastly maintain that only with the complete, irrevocable
rejection of God and the supernatural will humankind truly begin to live.
Rather than producing a feeling of despair, the decision to embrace atheism
should result in an exhilarating, almost intoxicating sense of freedom,
something akin to the experience of those American slaves who rejoiced upon
hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Only the atheist is
truly free. | |
| Albert Einstein | The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. | |
| W. Vaughn Ellsworth | Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors.
He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose,
they might take my property or confiscate my earnings,
what would my family do, how would they survive?'
He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that
the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty! | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live. | |
| Konnilyn G. Feig | Man is deeply vulnerable when faced with overwhelming evil. Instead of consolidating his energy to fight it, he wastes valuable time and effort puzzling over it, insisting it is not, cannot possibly be, what it seems. | |
| Marilyn Ferguson | Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom. | |
| E. M. Forster | We are willing enough to praise freedom
when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance.
In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee,
we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. | |