E. B. White on fear

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about ‘a’ man.

Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can’t control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn.

Mike Tysonborn 1966

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.

Julius Caesar100–44 BC

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself⁠—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Franklin D. Roosevelt1882–1945Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address (1933)