No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
- Edmund Burke

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
- Albert Camus

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th US President

Fear always springs from ignorance.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American lecturer, poet, and essayist

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk, activist and writer.

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
- Eric Hoffer

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour – with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander [1957]

The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.
- James Madison

Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate... Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and.. the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
- H.L. Menchen [1956]

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
- Henry Louis Mencken, American journalist (1880-1956)

One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security is more important than freedom. It ain't.
- Franklyn C. "Lyn" Nofziger, Press Secretary for President Reagan

Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens' lives. Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference.
- Congressman Ron Paul [his "Texas Straight Talk" column, August 2004]

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
- Bertrand Russell, English logician and philosopher (1872-1970)

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
- Bertrand Russell

The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection! But the roots of our individualism remind us that what we are is inseparable from the source from which all others derive; that coercive practices that threaten our neighbor also threaten us.
- Butler Shaffer