Yes, we are living in a world of fear. The life of man today is corroded and made bitter by fear. Fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, fear of ideologies. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself, because it is fear which drives men to act foolishly, to act thoughtlessly, to act dangerously. . . .

People are living in fear, people are not comfortable, people cannot even talk on the phone because they're scared somebody could be listening to their conversation.

I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts... And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!

Did it ever occur to you that everybody is more or less afraid of nearly everything, and that courage isn't a damn thing but a habit of not dodging things because you're afraid of them?

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

“Every creature has fear,” Jared said. “Even the non-conscious ones.”
“No,” Boutin said. “Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it’s not the same thing. Fear isn’t the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential.

The fear is simply because you are not living with life, You are living in your mind.

Why are people so afraid? The answer is that they have made themselves helpless and dependent on others. We are so lazy, we do not want to do anything ourselves. We want a Personal God, a Savior or a Prophet to do everything for us.

My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer.

If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear,

I once read that most people are afraid to live alone because to live alone means to die alone. They have visions of themselves eating their breakfast, enjoying the dripping sluice of a ripe plum, and then suddenly the lights go out and they fall face-first into their pancakes. People, it seems, are less afraid of loneliness than worrying about what other people will think when they’re found in some unappealing, disintegrating state, tongue out, one leg curled underneath the other, internal fluids in a puddle on the floor, etcetera. Most people are afraid that if left alone, they will not be found. Being found is apparently of the utmost importance to people.

Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death. Most of us have fear in one form or another; and where there is fear there is no intelligence.