But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.""It might to keep it open.

But as the day passed, his impatience turned from a fear to a kind of glad fierceness. At least he sought this danger of his own will; and the nearer he came to it the more sure he was that, for this time at least, for this hour perhaps before his death, he was free.

The builder of the prisonhouse, the sneakthief, the weakener, the enemy, was fear. There was no way to serve fear and be free.

A fear of using the imagination is very deep in America.

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

Fear, in a person of my temperament, is endemic and inevitable, and I can't do much about it except recognize it for what it is and try not to let it rule me entirely. If I'm in an angry mood and aware of it, I can ask myself, So what is it your afraid of? That gives me a place to look at my anger from. Sometimes it helps me get into clearer air.

They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.

We live well in the houses, well enough, but we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars. Now, we dare not go 100 miles from home. We keep a little knowledge and do nothing with it, but once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life.

I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.