I still get very scared when I step in front of a live audience.

Unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. In this world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president’s birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing ‚Happy Birthday,‘ like if I had been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing or something. I thought, ‚Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!‘

How can a president not be an actor?

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

People are terrified of me, and I want them to be.

It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.

Doing Saturday Night Live definitely affects my relationship with my girlfriend and with my family, because you feel so much pressure to do well that night. But I think everyone’s grown to accept that and so they give me my space at the show.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life giving speeches.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

Marriage is scary to me, man.

You must not fear death, my lads; defy him, and you drive him into the enemy’s ranks.

Fear is stupid. So are regrets.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

You entertain people who are satisfied. Hungry people can’t be entertained – or people who are afraid. You can’t entertain a man who has no food.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it… that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.

I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.

There will be days when I walk in an arena and people will cheer and then there might be days when I walk in an arena and people might boo, but it all sounds the same to me because it’s all just noise that lets me know that I’m relevant.

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.

Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear.

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.

Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.

I just didn’t want to get out there anymore; I didn’t want to get back into what I call ‚the swamp.‘ And the other reason why is I don’t think it’s good for the presidency for a former president to be opining about his successor. President Obama’s got plenty of critics – and I’m just not gonna be one.

I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

I write all my sermons.

I’m always worried about everything. Like spiders.

I don’t think anybody in America ought to be scared.

Timidity makes a person modest. It makes him or her say, ‚I’m not worthy of being written up in the record of deeds in heaven or on earth.‘ Timidity keeps people from their good. They are afraid to say, ‚Yes, I deserve it.‘

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Being brought up very religious, I have a fear of people that look to idol gods.

Dread, which is closely related to fear, steals the ability to enjoy ordinary life and makes people anxious about the future. It keeps them from looking forward to the next day, the next month, or the next decade.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

The ‚public‘ scares me, but people I trust.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.