Fear and Anxiety

This alone is to be feared: the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of spirit.

The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and hope.

Some have courage in pleasures, and some in pains; some in desires, and some in fears; and some are cowards under the same conditions.

No matter how hard you fight the darkness, every light casts a shadow, and the closer you get to the light, the darker that shadow becomes.

‘Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear; and yet that commonly is the case of kings.

A Stalin functionary admitted, ‘Innocent people were arrested: naturally—otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.’

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts . . . perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

Real freedom is freedom from fear, and unless you can live free from fear you cannot live a dignified human life.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.

Fear has many eyes.

Fear has a smell, as love does.

Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart’s controls.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates for a secret doubt.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?

I know perfectly well the cynic is a coward. He foresees all barrenness so that barrenness can never surprise him.