"I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud. "
— Stephen King

"Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?"
— Cory Doctorow

"Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it."
— Noam Chomsky

"Osama, baah!" Bashir roared.

"Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. That only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever."
— Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time)

""When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.""
— Thomas Jefferson

"Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?"
— Arundhati Roy

"There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. "
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"Beauty is only the start of bearable terror."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"But not you, O girl, nor yet his
mother,
stretched his eyebrows so fierce with
expectation.
Not for your mouth, you who hold him
now,
did his lips ripen into these fervent
contours.
Do you really think your quiet
footsteps
could have so convulsed him, you who
move like dawn wind?
True, you startled his heart; but older
terrors
rushed into him with that first jolt
to his emotions.
Call him . . . you'll never quite
retrieve him from those dark consorts.
Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved,
he makes a home
in your familiar heart, takes root
there and begins himself anew.
But did he ever begin himself?"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"An end in terror is preferable to terror without end."
— Sophie Scholl

"The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror"
— Gustave Flaubert

"Yo soy Drácula. Le doy la bienvenida, señor Harker, a mi casa."
— Bram Stoker (Dracula)

"Wer seinem Volk Angst macht, der braucht es [...] nicht zu fürchten."
— Heribert Prantl (Der Terrorist als Gesetzgeber. Wie man mit Angst Politik macht)

"It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror."
— Jean Lorrain

"Islamic laws states that muslims shouldn`t stay long in infidel lands"
— Osama bin Laden (Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden)

"She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb."
— Dean Koontz (Intensity)

"The shells had landed on the cobblestone road.

"Sonsofbitches," Wiseman muttered.

We looked up and grinned at each other.

"Here they come again!"

Sitting in an inch of water. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, held my breath, and clutched my elbows with my arms around my knees.

Three more shells came in, low and angry, and burst in the orchard.

"They're walking 'em towards us," I whispered.

I felt as if a giant with exploding iron fingers were looking for me, tearing up the ground as he came. I wanted to strike at him, to kill him, to stop him before he ripped into me, but I could do nothing. Sit and take it, sit and take it. The giant raked the orchard and tore up the roads and stumbled toward us in a terrible blind wrath as we sat in our hole with our heads between our legs and curses on our lips."
— David Kenyon Webster (Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich)

"Perowne, born the year before the Suez crisis, too young for the Cuban missiles, or the construction of the Berlin Wall, or Kennedy’s assassination, remembers being tearful over Aberfan in ‘sixty-six — one hundred and sixteen schoolchildren just like himself, fresh from prayers in school assembly, the day before half-term, buried under a sea of mud. This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"But I suspect the reported number of good novels this year is a result of 9/11 and all the other alarums of recent years. I think it set a certain gear into movement, unseen, silent, at the heart of many writers. Writers with children, writers with that hope of a peaceful century; a sort of literary battle stations. I was not surprised to hear Ali Smith describe her wonderful book The Accidental as a war book.
Sebastian Barry, in interview with TMO (2005)"
— Sebastian Barry

"Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system."
— Mikhail Bulgakov (Heart of a Dog)

"Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system."
— Mikhail Bulgakov

"Nobody should be whipped. Remember that, once and for all. Neither man nor animal can be influenced by anything but suggestion."
— Mikhail Bulgakov (Heart of a Dog)