Fear Quotes – Reflections on Anxiety and Uncertainty

"The fear of freedom is the fear of assuming responsibility."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need."

Daniel Kahneman

"Anyone who actually feels the need to get their hands on the levers of power in order to control other people, to tell them what to do, to scare them, is mentally disturbed."

Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert

"If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny."

Elon Musk

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas."

Josef Stalin

"A life that is unwilling to take risks inevitably begins to resemble death."

Robert Pfaller

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Martin Luther King

"For almost two years now, an alleged pandemic has had us firmly in its grip. Day after day, the media and politicians bombard us with narratives and measures. It’s time we take a stand against it. This may be our last chance. If we go along with it and they achieve their goal, life here will become very uncomfortable for us and for future generations. I hope that resistance and clarity continue to grow—and that we force an end to it."

Tobias Levels

"Fear of the virus—fear of getting sick, fear of dying—is the most effective distraction one can politically set in motion: to intimidate people and focus them on that fear so completely that, in the end, you can basically do whatever you want with us."

Dr. Hans-Joachim Maaz

"The mass media are a kind of mouthpiece for the consciousness of the population. If this powerful instrument falls into the wrong hands, it can cause more damage than all available nuclear weapons combined."

Christian Faltermeier

"Delusion is a self-contained value system that leads to a loss of rationality because it blocks open and critical thinking. When delusion arises in a community, irrational beliefs are amplified in the communal experience, reaching a fever pitch in moments of ecstasy that give individuals a feeling of happiness and power.

Mass delusion can have a neurotic and a psychotic component. Neurosis is the struggle between inner and outer reality. It is designed to win, otherwise it succumbs to panic. Psychosis is a closed value system in which the affected person feels completely secure. They are not in conflict with the reality of the outside world, but live in their own value system, which they perceive as real. A closed system defends its autonomy by developing a self-contained logic and deriving norms from it that must be accepted without question.

People who find themselves in a closed system become blind to reality and, when their irrational forces are unleashed, easily slip into dangerous delusion."

Hermann Broch

"Perhaps the following current example can best illustrate this point. We do not live in the clerical age, where lay people and clergy fought each other; nor do we live in the state-political age, when state officials and the people fought over democracy. The free growth area in the scientific age lies in a new pair of tensions, namely between research and knowledge. This pair of conflicts is still largely unclear.

We scholars all disguise ourselves as researchers, just as the old clergy behaved like saints in order to hold back the division between clergy and people. This does not change the fact that today the danger of the sciences becoming ossified is looming large.

Scholars are competent and therefore completely incapable of loving the overthrow of their virtue. They are science officials, and they always oppose amateurs. But since research is as much a part of science as the Holy Spirit is part of the Church, there is a great deal of pseudo-research competing with the progress of free research; and only the former is conscientiously supported by official bodies and foundations, because only this appears worthy of support to the professional officials of science.

Such harmful research acts according to the principle: Wash my fur, but don't get me wet.

It researches cancer according to Pasteur's outdated ideas, as if it were rabies.

It examines religion according to Wellhausen's ideas, but because it bases its research on ancient authority, it is extensively funded.

As long as scholars and researchers both remain poor, genuine research has prospects. That was the case until 1900. Today, the prognosis for research is deteriorating because grateful peoples are generously funding “science.” Thus, power is shifting to the side of the knowledgeable, against the researchers.

Our doctor factories and Rockefeller fellows are eloquent witnesses to this."

Eugen Rosenstock

"...the strongest analogy is to medicines, and you know is there something to worry about with medicines that is - might some of them have side effects? do we need safety testing,,i mean we´re taking things that are, you know, genetically modified organisms. and we´re injecting them in little kids´arms. we just shoot it right into the vein..."

Bill Gates

"he who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Let yourself be infected by humanity and then thoroughly infect your surroundings, so that the virus of charity conquers the world before another virus does."

Christa Schyboll

"When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies."

Ron Paul

"That was when lies entered Russia. The main misery was the loss of faith in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the dictates of moral sensibility was over. Now they had to conform to the norm and abide by the rules of the community. This aberration of society took hold of everything, infected everything. Everything fell under its influence."

Boris Pasternak

"All dictatorships feed on the fear of their subjects."

Richard von Weizsäcker