Scare Quotes

Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath.

Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.

For all their scare tactics, President Obama and Democrats have no plan whatsoever to preserve Medicare for future generations - or protect it for today's seniors and those nearing retirement. They did, however, cut Medicare by $700 billion to bankroll Obamacare.

A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.

The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

Ghost stories really scare me. I have such a big imagination that after I watch a horror movie like 'The Grudge', I look in the corners of my room for the next two days.

Anthology shows as a whole scare people. The networks can't quite get their heads around it.

A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.

I'm into sincerity in music and sincerity in art. If it doesn't feel true, I don't want to do it. Things that are too dramatic scare me. I think that's why I don't always fit into the world of performing arts.

I got confused. I thought it was a K.Y. scare, so I bought 2000 jars of personal lubricant. I still have some.

Perhaps I scare people. I don't know why.

There were also horror shows on the radio. Very terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They would come on at ten o'clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death.

My wife is my first audience. She's a tough lady, so I can't say that I ever scare her. Except, of course, when she sees me the way I look before breakfast.

Transformations don't scare me: it thrills me to become the polar opposite.

In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

I've earned all these years on my face. I don't want to be a liar if in five or 10 years I do get some Botox, but needles in the face scare me, so I don't really know if I am ever going to do that.

The only two things that scare me are God and the IRS.

I have a zero tolerance for sanctimonious morons who try to scare people.

One puts on black robes to scare the hell out of white people, while the other puts on white robes to scare the hell out of blacks.

To be honest, marriage doesn't scare me and that, it's just once you've been together for so long, if you haven't got any kids it's just a big expensive day out for everyone else to enjoy, isn't it?

Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It'll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we'll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won't fly anymore.

And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!

Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it's bound to get in the way. But, no, it doesn't scare me at all.

Girls are scary. Large groups of girls scare the crap out of me.

Scare answers to scare, and force begets force, until at length it comes to be seen that we are racing one against another after a phantom security which continually vanishes as we approach.

Sharks will scare me. I went out to Malibu a couple of weeks ago. Beautiful, clear day, out in five feet of water, going to surf, and there was this big ol' freakin' leopard shark... I'm looking at him and I'm thinking, 'OK, he won't hurt me.'

As we saw in the Queen's Speech, anti-social behaviour - a phenomenon that I believe to be a genuine worry that is also being fed by a lot of scare stories - is the political theme of the moment.

I don't know how the editors are going to take it or how it may be received. But to some extent I'm hoping that with the next book, when people pick it up and read it, it will scare the pants off of them.

The first and great commandment is, don't let them scare you.