Fear - Quotes
If you, If you can`t get people to like you, then you have to make them to respect you! And if they don`t respect you, then make them fear you!
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born.
Don`t let fear keep you quiet. You have a voice, so use it. Speak up. Raise your hands. Shout your answers. Make yourself heard. Whatever it takes, just find your voice, and when you do, fill the damn silence.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
No one can ever prepare you for what happens when you have a child. When you see the baby in your arms and you know that it`s your job now. No one can prepare you for the love and the fear. No one can prepare you for the love people you love can feel for them. And nothing can prepare you for the indifference of friends who don`t have babies.
Fear of the Lord is not the beginning of wisdom. It is the beginning of insanity.
Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy. Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow.
If love [...] is the reason for being moral, what relevance does the existence or non-existence of a deity have? Why can we not be prompted to the ethical life by our own charitable feelings? The existence of a god adds nothing to our moral situation, other than an invisible policeman who sees what we do (even in privacy and under cover of night), and a threat of post-mortem terrors if we misbehave. Such additions are hardly an enrichment of the moral life, since the underpinning they offer consists of fear and threats of punishment: which is exactly what, among other things, the moral life seeks to free us from.
I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest.
Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution. Many animals react instinctively with terror and flight at the approach of a predator. It is a healthy reaction, one that allows them to escape from danger. But it`s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly. Natural selection has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future. It`s a prerogative that`s certainly useful but one that has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight. Basically, I believe that the fear of death is the result of an accidental and clumsy interference between two distinct evolutionary pressures - the product of bad automatic connections in our brain rather than something that has any use or meaning.