Alfred Hitchcock Quotes

There's something about most phobias where there's a tiny, tiny corner where you think this really actually could happen.

Fear requires belief that you will be harmed, and it is easily manipulated by rhetoric.

That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.

Fear is a state of nervousness only fit for children

What happens with fear is that probability doesn't matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant.

The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.

By sort of combining the research of a lot of smart people, I came up with an equation for dread [dread=uncontrollability+unfamiliarity+imaginability+suffering+scale of destruction+unfairness]. The dread equation is a simplification, but it's a way to explain why we fear something so much when it is so unlikely. Part of it is the lack of control. That's why we're more scared of plane crashes than car crashes even though we know rationally which is more dangerous.

Unlike Western parents, reminding my child of Lord Voldemort didn't bother me.

Children today laugh at fathers who tell them about dragons. It is necessary to make fear a required subject; otherwise children will never learn it.

There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't.

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

People tell their children there are no monsters in the world. They tell them that because they believe it, or they want the child to feel safe. But there are monsters, Luke, all the more frightening because they look like people.

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

There is this paradox in fear: he is most likely to inspire it in others who has none himself!

When I was a child, fear was common to my life - fear of having nothing to eat, fear of the other children taunting me at school because I was illegitimate, and particularly fear of the big bombers appearing overhead and dropping their lethal bursts from the sky.

Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams.

There's something really cool about scaring children. Traumatize a generation, that's what it's all about.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.

If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors.

FEAR is an acronym in the English language for 'False Evidence Appearing Real'.

All fear violence, all are afraid of death.

Every fear hides a wish.

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.