Margaret Atwood Quotes

When desire dies, fear is born.

Frightened is the natural state for all men.

No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

It's one of the most basic laws of human nature, isn't it? The more we are denied something, the more we want it. The more silence given to this or that topic, the more power.

Perfect people are the scariest people to me.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

We fear the thing we want the most.

In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.

If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

The strongest passion is fear.

I don't think you're human if you don't get nervous.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

We are governed by our hopes and our fears.

It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire

Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies’ resources, and minimized their own.

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world

Fear does not have to be real to be powerful.

As humans, we don't know what we should do. We don't have those instincts like God has given animals. We have to see to know where we are going. It is just a natural human emotion to look for people to emulate.

I don't think fear can be abolished.