Scare Quotes (6 quotes)
A good scare is worth more to a man than advice.
Seen, for example, in Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings: A Collection of Paragraphs From the Atchison Globe (1911), 141. It is not made clear in the book, whether Howe originated this, or collected it as a saying.
God is love… . We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 143
I hear the scream of a great hawk, sailing with a ragged wing against the high wood-side, apparently to scare his prey and so detect it—shrill, harsh, fitted to excite terror in sparrows and to issue from his split and curved bill. I see his open bill the while against the sky. Spit with force from his mouth with an undulatory quaver imparted to it from his wings or motion as he flies.
(15 Jun 1852). In Henry David Thoreau and Bradford Torrey (ed.), The Writings of Henry Thoreau: Journal: IV: May 1, 1852-February 27,, 1853 (1906), 103.
Listen, I don't know anything about polygraphs and I don’t know how accurate they are, but I know they’ll scare the hell out of people.
Oval Office Tape (14 Jul 1971), quoted in Nature (23 Feb 1984) 307, 682.
The cancer scare has increased the use of borrowed cigarettes.
In E.C. McKenzie, 14,000 Quips and Quotes for Speakers, Writers, Editors, Preachers, and Teachers (1990), 85.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Poem, ‘Desert Places’, in Collected Poems of Robert Frost 1939 (1945), 386.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
