Collective Anxiety Quotes

There is an innate fear that runs within Israeli society of all that we see and hear around us, and you know what? It's a natural reaction of human beings.

The French are very bizarre. There is this collective depiction: 'We're in decline, we're being assailed, we must protect ourselves.'

We are a nation of people who are afraid we are not enough.

Remember, taboos are just a map of what a society feels it's acceptable to be neurotic about. Taboos aren't rational.

Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster. Psychologically the situation is analogous to that of people trampled to death when there is a panic in a theatre caused by a cry of 'Fire!'.

It all changed when I realized I'm not the only one on the planet who's scared. Everyone else is, too. I started asking people, Are you scared, too? You bet your sweet life I am. Aha, so that's the way it is for you, too. We were all in the same boat. That's probably what is so effective at our workshops. When I ask, Who else feels like this? the whole room of hands goes up. People realize they are not the only one who feels that way.

There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future.

The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and 'free-floating' anxiety of many people into sharp focus.

I'm Jewish... We're a very nervous group. Paranoid. Anxiety-ridden. Maybe that Hitler thing made us a little jumpy. Nothing like a Holocaust to make you mind your Ps and Qs for a couple hundred years I always say.

Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis.

It all changed when I realized I'm not the only one on the planet who's scared. Everyone else is, too.

Pay attention to other people's nightmares because they might be contagious.

In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.

The community isn't nearly as afraid as it thinks it is.

The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.

Must one dread what others dread?

My angst and my insecurity reflect the state's angst and insecurity. The state is scared too.

The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights.

A lot of it was really, really fun, but at some point, things started getting weird. We didn't allow each other to breathe. We didn't really have a sense of ourselves individually. We were very insecure... We were really threatened by the thought of 'Oh my God, what if someone goes off and does something outside the band?'

Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.

I think our nation is at a pivotal point. Too many people fear that we are losing the sense of limitless possibility that has always defined this nation.

Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest passtime

The English are loth to express their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.

Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.

I think there's a collective consciousness around the world that there are things beyond our control that have the power to annihilate us, as a species, and it's all rather frightening.