Fear Quotes

“Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“I carry my liberty with me. It is in my thoughts, in my head. Shakespeare is one of my countries, Goethe another. You can change that badge that I wear, but you can’t change the way I think. It is through my intellect that I can escape the roles, intrusions, and obligations with which every civilisation, every community would burden me. I make myself my own homeland through my affinities, my choices, my ideas, and no one can take it away from me – I may even be able to enlarge it. I don’t spend my life in the company of crowds but individuals. If I could pick fifty individuals from each nation, then perhaps I could put together a society I’d be happy with. My first possession is myself; better to sent it into exile than to lose it, to change a few habits rather than terminate my role as a human being. We only have one homeland: the world.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“In short, the war got off to a pretty good start, with the help of chaos.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Men were snoring, twitching and whimpering, struggling with nightmares less terrible than reality.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“God? Come off it, the heavens are empty, as empty as a corpse. There’s nothing in the sky but shells and all the other murderous devices made by men . . .”
― Gabriel Chevalier, La Peur

“Men are sheep. Which is why armies and wars are possible. They die victims of their stupid docility.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Heldenangst

“hope. Ahead and behind merged into limitless desolation, all covered with the same churned up grey mud. We were stranded on some ice-floe out in space, surrounded by clouds of sulphur, ravaged by sudden bursts of thunder. We prowled in these accursed limbos which at any moment now would turn into hell.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear: A Novel of World War I

“- Avant la guerre, soit. Mais les choses auront changé. Il est impossible qu'une certaine grandeur ne résulte pas d'événements aussi exceptionnels.
- Il n'y a eu de grandeur que devant la mort. L'homme qui ne s'est pas sondé jusqu'au fond des entrailles, qui n'a pas envisagé d'être dépecé par l'obus qui allait venir ne peur pas parler de grandeur.
- Tu es injuste pour certains chefs...
- Parfait ! Attendris-toi, remercie, esclave ! Tu sais bien que les chefs font une carrière, une partie de poker. Ils jouent leur réputation. La belle affaire ! Gagnants, ils sont immortels. Perdants, ils se retirent avec de bonnes rentes et passent le reste de leur vie à se justifier dans leurs mémoires. Il est trop facile d'être sincère en se tenant à l'abri.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Tout le monde prenait l'air librement et les projectiles consistaient en boules de pain et en paquets de tabac. Une ou deux fois par jour, un Allemand annonçait : "Offizier !" pour signaler une ronde de ses chefs. Cela voulait dire : "Attention ! nous allons peut-être nous trouver dans l'obligation de vous envoyer quelques grenades." Ils prévinrent même d'un coup de main et l'information fut reconnue exacte. Puis la chose s'ébruita. L'arrière prescrivit une enquête. On parla de trahison, de conseil de guerre, et des sous-officiers furent cassés. On semblait craindre que les soldats se missent d'accord pour terminer la guerre , à la barbe des généraux. Il paraît que ce dénouement eût été monstrueux.
Il ne faut pas que la haine s'apaise. Tel est l'ordre. Malgré tout, la nôtre manque de flamme...”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Les hommes respectent un chef dont la sévérité s'exerce dans les circonstances graves et qui paie de sa personne, mais ils méprisent profondément celui qui les persécute sans avoir fait ses preuves.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“A man has the right to be stupid on his own account, but not on behalf of others.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear: A Novel of World War I

“You don't by chance believe that the war has killed all the halfwits? They belong to a race that will never die out. I'm sure there was a halfwit in Noah's Ark and he was the most prolific male on God's blessed raft!”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Müzik zamanı, şimdi olduğu gibi,nabız atışlarına dönüştürdüğünde, sonsuzluk aradaki boşluklardadır”
― John Berger, Fear

“Let me give you the balance sheet of this war: fifty great men to go down in the annals of history; millions of dead who won’t be mentioned any more; and one thousand millionaires who lay down the law. A soldier’s life is worth about fifty francs in the wallet of some fat industrialist in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna or anywhere else. Are you getting the picture?’ ‘So”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear: A Novel of World War I

“Men’s opinions are based on the size of their bank balance. To have or not to have, as Shakespeare would say.’ ‘Before”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear: A Novel of World War I

“More than anything I am afraid of fear itself overwhelming me. One must use any bit of folly to control it.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“I know I am incapable of courage unless I have decided to give my life. Without that choice, there is nothing but flight. But you take such a decision on the spur of the moment and you cannot make it last for weeks and months. The mental effort is too great. Hence the rarity of true courage. We generally accept a kind of lame compromise between the destiny and the man, which reason rejects.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“So, in order to be courageous, I now have a fairly simple means at my disposal: to accept death.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“I have noticed that the bravest are the ones most lacking in imagination and sensitivity. This is understandable. If life had not already accustomed the men in the front lines to resignation and the passive obedience of the humble, they would run away. And if those defending the front were highly strung intellectuals, the war would soon become impossible.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Here everything is planned for killing. The ground is ready to receive us, the bullets are ready to hit us, the spots where the shells will explode are fixed in time and space, just like the paths of our destiny which will inevitably lead us to them. And yet we want to stay alive and we use all our mental strength to silence the voice of reason. We are well aware that death does not immortalise a human being in the memories of the living, it simply cancels him out.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Love is a transaction, at least of emotions in the rarest cases: you love to get something in return.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“The middle classes did not go to public hospitals; those places were reserved for workers, child-mothers, and those unfortunates who had wasted their inheritance, ‘squandered the lot’, and thus deserved the worst punishments, those, in short, who had gone to rack and ruin. Families would warn their wastrel offspring, their prodigal sons, that ‘You’ll end up in hospital!’, that is, poor, alone and ashamed . Seeing the forbidding exteriors of these institutions, their gloomy corridors, the miserable huddles of mourners that sometimes emerged, used to make me think vaguely of leper colonies.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Women all have the same female pretentions and even the most virtuous among them like to convince themselves that they can tempt a man.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Alas, God’s poor ministers are just as much in the dark as we are. You must believe like old women believe, the ones that look like witches, who mumble to themselves in churches under the nose of cheap, plaster saints. As soon as you start to use your reason, to look for a rainbow, you always run up against the great excuse, mystery. You will be advised to light some candles, put coins in the box, say a few rosaries, and make yourself stupid.”
― Gabriel Chevalier, La Peur

“Alas, God's poor ministers are just as much in the dark as we are. You must believe like old women believe, the ones that look like witches, who mumble to themselves in churches under the nose of cheap, plaster saints. As soon as you start to use your reason, to look for a rainbow, you always run up against the great excuse, mystery. You will be advised to light some candles, put coins in the box, say a few rosaries, and make yourself stupid.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“They had also brought in a piece of human scrap so monstrous that everyone recoiled at the sight, that it shocked men who were no longer shockable. I shut my eyes; I had already seen far too much and I wanted to be able to forget eventually. This thing, this being, screamed in a corner like a maniac. The revulsion that turned our stomachs told us that it would be an act of generosity, a fraternal act, to finish him off.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“I had been astonished to find myself in the middle of the war yet not be able to find it, unable to accept that in fact the war consisted precisely of this stasis.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear