Fear Politics Quotes

We shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so that they will vote for you or scaring people to date so that we can create a terror-industrial complex.

A politician finds anything to do with racial problems far more frightening than a gun.

Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.

I hate fear politics.

Faced with global challenges, politicians like Donald Trump have played on the fears and concerns of the American people with divisive, hateful rhetoric and proposals.

My fear with Trump was always that he didn't have great solutions.

Such pip-squeaks as Nixon and McCarthy are trying to get us so frightened of Communism that we'll be afraid to turn out the lights at night.

I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I'm wondering, I don't think I've changed, but it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that's kind of where we are.

President Trump has harnessed the fear and prejudice that have accompanied every wave of immigrants in United States history, and stoked those fears to further his own agenda.

9/11 changed everything. We lose more Americans every year drowning in the bathtub than through terrorism. But terrorism has been used as a lever to frighten people, pass legislation, sound tough and coerce us into giving away our rights in pursuit of phantom problems.

I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.

Trump represents 30 percent of right wing ideology of white scared people. People who have freaked out as Trump points the blame on Mexicans when you have what you have in Europe. He is making all of the white people scared only 3 out of 10 people really believe all the stuff that is being said by him. You have to remember that there are still 7 out of 10 people in this country who don't think his ideas are good ideas. I am not afraid of Trump; I am more afraid of the people that think his ideas are good.

All it takes to get elected in twenty-first-century America is a mob of frightened sheep and a wolf with a nice smile.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.

We can either be governed by fear - fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, call the press the enemy of the people, tear kids away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border - or we can be governed by our ambitions and our aspirations and our desire to make the most out of all of us. And that's America at its best.

The removal of people of Japanese descent from their homes and their incarceration in camps were executed with the same sort of political calculus of fear and bigotry that Mr. Trump is using to redefine American immigration policy.

Is Stephen Harper using the imagined fear of widespread security threats to score political points before the next election?

[Criticizing Republican attacks:] The politics of smear and fear are not worthy of this republic.

Politics is partially about what you fear more than what you love, so there are plenty of things about liberalism all by itself that make me tempted to support Trump.

The Democrats have nothing to cheer but fear itself.

Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendancy of the people.

I think that Donald Trump has capitalized and prayed on people's fears.

The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time.

Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.

Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us-to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is.