Hysteria Quotes

It's better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use 'em, abuse 'em and utilize 'em. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Take away the newspaper - and this country of ours would become a scene of chaos. Without daily assurance of the exact facts - so far as we are able to know and publish them - the public imagination would run riot. Ten days without the daily newspaper and the strong pressure of worry and fear would throw the people of this country into mob hysteria - feeding upon rumors, alarms, terrified by bugbears and illusions. We have become the watchmen of the night and of a troubled day ... ~ Harry Chandler

No one has touched me in 264 days. Sometimes I think the loneliness inside of me is going to explode through my skin and sometimes I'm not sure if crying or screaming or laughing through the hysteria will solve anything at all. Sometimes I'm so desperate to touch to be touched to feel that I'm almost certain I'm going to fall off a cliff in an alternate universe where no one will ever be able to find me. It doesn't seem impossible. I've been screaming for years and no one has ever heard me. "Aren't you hungry?" His voice is lower now, a little worried now. I've been starving for 264 days. "No." The word is little more than a broken breath as it escapes my lips ~ Tahereh Mafi

A worm of fear wriggled in Jaden's stomach, and the ethereal assuredness he channeled moments before evaporated as the worm burrowed deeper. When he next spoke, his own voice of trapped hysteria broke through, the worm having reached journey's end. ~ Courtney Kirchoff

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity. ~ Terence McKenna

Part of what interests me is the impulse to dismiss and how often it slides into the very incoherence or hysteria of which women are routinely accused. It would be nice if, say, Rush Limbaugh, who called Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" for testifying to Democrats in Congress about the need to fund birth control and who apparently completely failed to comprehend how birth control works - Limbaugh the word-salad king, the factually challenged, the eternally riled - got called hysterical once in a while. ~ Rebecca Solnit

We live in a world that fosters distraction, hysteria and a manic addiction to inputs. We are a culture of checkers. We check our phones, we check our feeds, we check our follows. We check the headlines. Always input. Always checking. Always someone else's agenda. And we suck it in like we can't get enough. Because we can't. ~ Christine Kane

And yes, to answer you seriously, I am beginning to be ... well, not bored, but tempted; afraid, but tempted. When you've been in pain for a long time, when you wake up every morning with a rising sense of hysteria, then boredom is what you want, marathon sleeps, a silence in yourself. ~ Truman Capote

Fear of black independence and self-determination took a Freudian form: rape hysteria. In one town after another, racial violence was sparked by rumors that a Negro had harmed a white woman. This happened in Washington; Omaha, Neb.; Kansas City, Kan.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Longview, Tex.; and Rosewood, Fla. ~ Anonymous

There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it.

History in live performance.

If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature--had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him.

Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn't tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn't hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn't rape him. Or behead him.

After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak. ~ Arundhati Roy

Dinner 'conversation' at the Cohens' meant my sister, mom, and I relaying in brutal detail the day's events in a state of amplified hysteria, while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head. ~ Andy Cohen

Being in the moment means not being distracted by the melodrama and hysteria around you. Present-moment awareness allows solutions to emerge. ~ Deepak Chopra

I was thrown into a state of sheer, mindless panic. "It's my mother!" I whispered fiercely,
as if Bones hadn't figured that out. "Holy shit, you have to hide!"
I literally shoved him toward the bedroom, yelling, "I - I'll be right there, I'm not
dressed!"
He went, but with none of my hysteria. "Kitten, you still haven't told her? Blimey, what
are you waiting for?"
The Second Coming of Christ!" I snapped. "And not a moment sooner! Here, in the
closet! ~ Jeaniene Frost

This was the affair which had ended quietly and decently, without fuss or scenes or hysteria. When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it. ~ Jean Rhys

The moral panic about supposedly unpatriotic educators was driven by international war hysteria combined with agitation over the growing domestic political strength of teachers unions. In 1917 and 1918, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to ban public speech and actions "disloyal" to the United States military and government, especially among socialists, communists, pacifists, immigrants, and other groups perceived as affiliated with European leftism. More than any other force, the American Legion, a veterans' organization, pushed this ethos of unquestioning patriotism onto the nation's public schools. The Legion was influential: 16 U.S. senators and 130 congressmen identified as members. It promoted the idea that the Communist Party in Moscow actively recruited American teachers in order to enlist them in brainwashing the nation's youth. The Legion saw all left-of-center political activity as unacceptably anti-American. ~ Dana Goldstein

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it. ~ Don DeLillo

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria. ~ Vance Packard

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love. ~ Milan Kundera

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me. ~ Charles Baudelaire

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. ~ Edward R. Murrow

And now, it seems, they are all here: the handsome masculine ones desired alike by men and women; the gushing swishes, hands aflutter like wings; the few stray women secure among the men who will idolize them but not love them; and as in any group of homosexuals and those lured for whatever reason to them, there is here a mood of superficial good humor, of euphoria bordering on hysteria. So ~ John Rechy

Her lungs felt scorched, her face singed as she struggled to her hands and knees, fighting hysteria, the concussion of the blast driving the breath from her. The house was nothing more than a pile of burning rubble. She couldn't see the children. Where were they? Maybe they'd been far enough away from the explosion. Maybe they were still alive. She had to find them. Her legs wobbled under her as she staggered to ~ Kaylea Cross

When you live in hysteria, people start thinking emotionally. ~ John Mellencamp

Alongside of the physical symptoms of hysteria, a number of psychical disturbances are to be observed, in which at some future time the changes characteristic of hysteria will no doubt be found but the analysis of which has hitherto scarcely been begun. These are changes in the passage and in the association of ideas, inhibitions of the activity of the will, magnification and suppression of feelings, etc.
which may be summarized as "changes in the normal distribution over the nervous system of the stable amounts of excitation". ~ Sigmund Freud

I believe, AGW is simply a kind of collective hysteria with no basis in science ... ~ Roger Helmer

Arrested for the second, whether in admiration for Lord d'Aubigny's inventiveness or in a kind of silent snort of hysteria at the prodigies expected of him - a condition, O'LiamRoe recognized, to which Lymond was all too prone - Francis Crawford was off guard for the one moment that mattered. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

No" she jerked back, stared up at him.
Her eyes were like thunderclouds. He'd never seen them like that. Shock and fear filled them. Her face was paper white. Her body shuddering.
"Don't you leave me!" She gripped his shirt and tried to shake him, tears falling from her eyes. "Don't you leave Noah."
His head lowered. He touched her lips with his and knew this woman held the best part of him. The memories of the husband he had been, the man he had been. He couldn't destroy that. He refuse to.
He pushed her to Jordan slowly, loath to let her go. To release her. Knowing that releasing her was the only way to save the memories she held.
"Don't you leave me!" She screamed the order, eyes blazing, her lips trembling as tears fell and hysteria threatened to overwhelm her. "If you leave me, Noah Blake, if you don't come back when this is over, don't bother coming back at all.
He touched her cheek. Ran his thumb over her lips. "You are the best part of me," he whispered. "Always remember that, Sabella. The very best part of me."
Before she could grab him, hold him to her, he pulled away, grabbed one of the rifles Mike had set on the table across the room. And left."
― Lora Leigh, Wild Card ~ Lora Leigh

hysteria," a term used for women who exhibited sexual desire and strong emotions. ~ Mia Sheridan

back in the middle ages
they burned unruly women at the stake
and out of the ashes of their bones and flesh
rose the Enlightenment and Reason fresh
and the white men declared
there's no such thing as witches
they're just crazy psycho-bitches
but we certainly can't let them run free
lock 'em up and throw away the key
yeah they said: lock 'em up and throw away the key

cause there's nothing scarier than a woman mad and/or
aware of her own magic
tragic how much violence is done
in the name of science
to ensure our silence

in Victorian times they located suffering in our uterus
in the blood in the soft internal organs
took our pain our righteous rage
they called it 'hysteria'
and then Dr. Freud ignored women's horror stories
herstories of abuse and rape and
took a justified hatred of the penis and called it
envy (he sold more books that way) ~ Leah Harris

We had another game where he was the doctor making a house call and I was the proper Victorian lady besieged by hysteria (also known as sexual frustration) which could only be relieved by a paroxysm (also known as an orgasm) the doctor brought on with either his hand or my vibrator. (At first Quinn didn't believe me when I told him that this actually happened in history, and that vibrators were, in fact, invented by doctors whose hands were cramping up from flicking sexually frustrated Victorian beans all day long, but I swear to God it's true. Just another one of those fun facts stored up in my brain.) ~ Melanie Harlow

The patient in question was a young woman whose parents brought her in because she complained incessantly of stomach pains. Freud diagnosed her with hysteria. A few months later, she died of abdominal cancer. ~ Kathryn Schulz

Religion has truly become mass-hysteria, our forefathers practiced it for self preservation,we practice it for politics. ~ Nighat Hafiz

We are in control, they are in a state of hysteria. Losers, they think that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those bastards. ~ Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises - on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive ~ Truman Capote

Once ether was everywhere. The crook of an arm, say. (Also the heavens.) It slowed the movement of the stars, told the left hand where the right hand went. Then it was gone, like hysteria, like the hollow earth. The news came over the radio. There is only air now. Abandon your experiments. ~ Jenny Offill

Honesty works against you in the entertainment field. I try to be a journalist and a documentarian, but that doesn't mean that people are going to embrace it at the moment. The point is I'm leaving the mark of my hysteria and the political hysteria, and that's it ... I can only do what I do. ~ Lydia Lunch

You have to go back to the Children's Crusade in 1212 AD to find as unfortunate and fatuous an attempt at manipulated hysteria as the Women's Liberation Movement. ~ Helen Lawrenson

That night the Salt Fish Girl came back looking exhausted and dishevelled. A Malaysian girl who worked at her factory had been stricken with hysteria, had gone to the toilet and begun screaming and tearing at her hair. She had been working at the factory for nearly three years and was half blind and bored out of her wits with the tedious repetitiveness of the work. Her hysteria had provoked others, until half the women in the factory were screaming and howling and throwing themselves against the walls in sheer frustration with the dreariness of their toil and the damage it was exacting from their once young bodies and once bright faces. ~ Larissa Lai

Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy. ~ Rachel Cusk

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People sceamed, wept, gave away t heir possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the world to "Sugar Magnolia." Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward. ~ Donna Tartt

The national hysteria over hippies and punks alike fell right in line with Puritan minister Ezekiel Rogers' admonition of 1657: "I find great Trouble and Grief about the Rising Generation. Young People are stirred here [in the colonies]; but they strengthen one another in Evil, by Example, by Counsel. ~ Nancy Jo Sales

The patterns overhead shifted so that, had she an imagination prone to hysteria, she could easily convince herself something hid in the curtains above her head. She imagined a face in the shadows and folds of fabric, a face with sad, hollow eyes. The sliver of light shining through a crack in the window curtains disappeared. Shadows deepened and swirled and the face became even more uncannily real. ~ Carolyn Jewel

My cousin tried to kill me today," he said. He realized that his voice held an edge of hysteria. "She nearly succeeded. But I guess that's fair, since I was trying to kill her at the time. ~ Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

000-x02 Dissociative reaction
This reaction represents a type of gross personality disorganization, the basis of which is a neurotic disturbance, although the diffuse dissociation seen in some casts may occasionally appear psychotic. The personality disorganization may result in aimless running or "freezing." The repressed impulse giving rise to the anxiety may be discharged by, or deflected into, various symptomatic expressions, such as depersonalization, dissociated personality, stupor, fugue, amnesia, dream state, somnambulism, etc. The diagnosis will specify symptomatic manifestations.
These reactions must be differentiated from schizoid personality, from schizophrenic reaction, and from analogous symptoms in some other types of neurotic reactions. Formerly, this reaction has been classified as a type of "conversion hysteria. ~ American Psychiatric Association

But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? ~ Milan Kundera

What I do, it's personal. I take responsibility for it. It's me. It ain't some hormones or rite of passage or mass hysteria. I don't fucking cry about it in the morning. ~ Joshua Gaylord

Tell me of a right wing-induced hysteria of the last 50 years ~ Dennis Prager

The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is that it forces us to think and talk and feel in terms of abstractions - those "communists" this time, those "fascists" last time.
But those we are fighting and killing are people - men, women and children - not political, geographic or economic abstractions. They are, in the main, as decent and fearful and confused as we are. And they regard us as abstractions as much as we do them. ~ Sydney J. Harris

She had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was most important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. ~ George Orwell

I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence. ~ Jeffrey Tate

Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? ~ Sinclair Lewis

So before and during the war, the Bush administration had to build up an image in people's minds of Iraq as a monstrous military superpower, in order to mobilize enough popular hysteria so that people here would go along with their policies. And again, the media did their job 100 percent. So I don't know how well you remember what was going on around the country back then, but people were literally quaking in their boots about the extraordinary might of Iraq―it was a superpower with artillery we'd never dreamt of, all this kind of stuff.93 I mean, this was a defenseless Third World country that was so weak it had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran in eight years of warfare [from 1980 to '88]―and that was with the support of the United States, the Soviet Union, all of Europe, the Arab oil countries: not an inconsiderable segment of world power. Yet with all those allies, Iraq had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran, which had killed off its own officers' corps and barely had an army left: all of a sudden this was the superpower that was going to conquer the world? You really had to be a deeply brainwashed Western intellectual even to look at this image―a defenseless Third World country threatening the two most advanced military forces in the world, the United States and Britain―and not completely collapse in ridicule. But as you recall, that's what all of them were saying―and people here really believed it. ~ Noam Chomsky

Like most people I am smarter than some, dumber than others, skinnier than most, and fatter than a few, but none was ever more confused than I was. I flew with confusion always parallel to me, and a whole internal chase at my rear. The one matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all the others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the truth that I had had little truck with the truth in my life. It was not that I considered myself a resident in a den of lies, but rather that my history was shrouded and diced and soaking wet with hysteria and contradiction. Contradictions or no, my trajectory through life, though different from most, was, nonetheless, a trajectory. ~ Percival Everett

And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart. (p. 37) ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Nature Boy

I was just a boy when I sat down
To watch the news on TV
I saw some ordinary slaughter
I saw some routine atrocity
My father said, don't look away
You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now
He said, that in the end it is beauty
That is going to save the world, now

And she moves among the sparrows
And she floats upon the breeze
She moves among the flowers
She moves something deep inside of me

I was walking around the flower show like a leper
Coming down with some kind of nervous hysteria
When I saw you standing there, green eyes, black hair
Up against the pink and purple wisteria
You said, hey, nature boy, are you looking at me
With some unrighteous intention?
My knees went weak,
I couldn't speak, I was having thoughts
That were not in my best interests to mention

And she moves among the flowers
And she floats upon the smoke
She moves among the shadows
She moves me with just one little look

You took me back to your place
And dressed me up in a deep sea diver's suit
You played the patriot, you raised the flag
And I stood at full salute
Later on we smoked a pipe that struck me dumb
And made it impossible to speak
As you closed in, in slow motion,
Quoting Sappho, in the original Greek

She moves among the shadows
She floats upon the breeze
She moves among ~ Nick Cave

Politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred. ~ Louise Bogan

The entire road trip could be summed up as one giant attempt to keep from crashing the car during fits of rage and fits of hysteria. ~ Kari Martindale

Music should be a collective magic and hysteria. ~ Pierre Boulez

Global warming is the most prominent form of mass hysteria raging across the world today. ~ Doug Casey

Even rational, data-driven scientists could be sent into prolonged states of hysteria when presented with evidence that their favorite foods might be killing them. ~ T. Colin Campbell

Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is ananathema to these idiots. I predict that in the near future, right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus. ~ Gus Van Sant

Hysteria, epilepsy, tuberculosis, and cancer were all found to result from the erratic propensities of a past life. ~ Max Heindel

I lay there for three whole days, totally paralyzed. My friends helped me to the bathroom and anywhere else I needed to move; but I have very vague impressions of those days because it was a time of complete darkness for me. Somebody told me later that what I had was a form of hysteria: my body and my mid fled into paralysis. There was nothing wrong with me organically, but somewhere inside I suffered a complete breakdown. ~ Diet Eman

Sometimes I think the loneliness inside of me is going to explode through my skin and sometimes I'm not sure if crying or screaming or laughing through the hysteria will solve anything at all. Sometimes I'm so desperate to touch, to be touched, to feel, that I'm almost certain I'm going to fall off a cliff in an alternate universe where no one will ever be able to find me. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized? ~ Louis Kronenberger

Hysteria may come as always, infernal dreams with their black haze. Still, I shall devour the days triumphantly chasing History and its stories. ~ The Raveness

I'm an old dog; I don't get too excited. I don't get caught up in all the mass hysteria. ~ Tim Howard

Our information network is much better protected than our railroad network, and someone who cracks a system is able to cause far less human damage than someone who derails a train. Why, then, has 'computer crime' caused so much hysteria? Perhaps because the public is so willing - eager, even - to be scared by bogeymen. ~ Charles Platt

So, to do right by a Gothic tale, let's be frank, requires that the author be a militant romantic who relates the action of his narratives in dreamy and more than usually emotive language. Hence, the well-known grandiose rhetoric of the Gothic tale, which may be understood by the sympathetic reader as not just an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon waves of bombast, but also as the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. ~ Thomas Ligotti

When the news of the creature broke, it was possible that the victims had attributed to the Monkeyman injuries that they had unknowingly inflicted on themselves in their sleep.

'It could be mass hysteria caused by mass media,' he concluded.

Dr. Desai's report lay on my desk for many days: a snap-shot of a city splintering under the strain of a fundamental urban reconfiguration- a city of the exhausted, distressed, and restless, struggling with the uncertainties of eviction and unemployment; a city of twenty million histrionic personas resiliently absorbing the day's glancing blows only to return home and tenderly claw themselves to sleep. ~ Aman Sethi

Don't you leave!" She screamed the order, eyes blazing, her lips trembling as tears fell and hysteria threatened to overwhelm her. "If you leave me, Noah Blake, if you don't come back when this is over, don't bother coming back at all.
He touched her cheek. Ran his thumb over her lips. "You are the best part of me," he whispered. "Always remember that, Sabella. The best part of me. ~ Lora Leigh

By giving unusual people an easy way to find one another, the Internet has also enabled them to pool rare talents, resources, and voices, then push their case into public consciousness. The response, in many cases, is a kind of hysteria. ~ Virginia Postrel

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.
(Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?)
Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They w ~ Don DeLillo

But Friedan and Greer's movement had passed them by: rape hysteria became fully integrated into mainstream feminism, resulting in such events as the so-called Take Back the Night rallies at colleges around America, which are premised on the idea that when darkness falls over the quad, male students metamorphose, werewolf-like, into potential rapists. ~ Bruce Bawer

What did religion do to people, to provoke such obstinancy, such hysteria - how did it push people to the stage of torturing themselves and killing each other? ~ Manil Suri

To be loved, feelings must be rationed. To love, the doors of hysteria, fantasy, and madness may be flung open. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn't believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk. ~ Ulrich Beck

Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, thing have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with "morality." Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there. ~ Joan Didion

War hysteria and dark nationalism deactivates the mass prefrontal cortex ( the rational brain ) and activates the amygdala ( the fear centers ). They are the key tools for dark democracy. ~ Amit Ray

I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement. ~ Jon Voight

The more accepting I've become about all the pieces of myself - even the crazed, hysterical ones - the more relaxed I've become with who I am.

And then one day you figure out how to be more peaceful with all of your hysteria, and suddenly you're not as hysterical so often. ~ Scott Stabile

Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months. ~ Tom Robbins

The trouble with hysteria is that it's contagious. ~ Romain Gary

Fascinating to watch the reactions of people suddenly seized by fear. Some can't take it. They let themselves go to a point of hysteria, then in panic flee to - God knows where. Most take it, with various degrees of courage and coolness. In the lobby tonight: the newspapermen milling around trying to get telephone calls through the one lone operator. Jews excitedly trying to book on the last plane or train. The wildest rumours coming in with every new person that steps through the revolving door from outside, all of us gathering around to listen, believing or disbelieving according to our feelings. ~ William L. Shirer

I'm not sure I'll ever know the meaning of life or what comes for us after death, but I know it's more than the hysteria people make it out to be. It's about freeing your soul when no one else can; turning thirty and still feeling like you're seventeen. It's about taking chances on a whim, embracing the rain during the storm, and smiling so damn much that you start to cry. It's never regretting, never forgetting, and always being.
It's kissing underwater and touching in the dark. Loving even when you think it's emotionally impossible and surviving someway and somehow.
It's about living life with a full heart and an overflowing glass.
I live life on the edge. I dream, I care, and I belong.
I know there's a here and now.
I know that I want it. ~ Nadege Richards

The only one of the early investigators who carried the exploration of hysteria to its logical conclusion was Breuer's patient Anna O. After Breuer abandoned her, she apparently remained ill for several years. And then she recovered. The mute hysteric who had invented the "talking cure" found her voice and her sanity, in the women's liberation movement. Under a pseudonym, Paul Berthold, she translated into German the classic treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and authored a play, Women's Rights. Under her own name, Bertha Papenheim became a prominent feminist social worker, intellectual, and organizer. In the course of a long and fruitful career she directed an orphanage for girls, founded a feminist organization for Jewish women and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East to campaign against the sexual exploitation of women and children. Her dedication, energy and commitment were legendary. In the words of a colleague, 'A volcano lived in this woman... Her fight against the abuse of women and children was almost a physically felt pain for her.' At her death, the philosopher Martin Buber commemorated her: 'I not only admired her but loved her, and will love her until the day I die. There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionate spirit. Bertha Pappenheim was a woman with just such a spirit. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria. ~ George Takei

The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I'd seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game. ~ Knute Rockne

And I want you now
I want you now
I'll feel my heart implode
And I'm breaking out
Escaping now
Feeling my faith erode ~ Muse

She was beautiful, too, with dark eyebrows and deep-set eyes outlined in black. Her image was like sharp glass cutting into me, I rushed to the surface to meet her with an urgency bordering on hysteria. Someone get gauze and bandages. I'm falling out. She's some dream I had. She's got part of me I didn't know I needed. ~ Bett Williams

She could not be silent even if the men of science, many of them smug experts in white lab coats who promised "better living through chemistry," dismissed her warnings as feminine hysteria. ~ Mark Hamilton Lytle

Workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues. ~ Alain De Botton

One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else's sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria. ~ Russell Banks

The promise of Plath's work was that a woman could de-fang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Bronte, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for "sins" that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was -- her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men -- she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too. ~ Sady Doyle

Perhaps," said Jasper shyly, "you would like some Gargletine Instant Breakfast Drink?"
Katie fixed him with a long, level stare. Gargletine TM caused hysteria in lab rats and took the brown off horses. "Maybe not," said Katie. "But thanks. ~ M T Anderson

To be sure, depression, anxiety, and prolonged stress can cause specific physical symptoms, but these symptoms are not limitless, nor are they actually unexplained. When doctors invoke these labels for symptoms as diverse as vomiting, paralysis, and sever, unending pain, it is the concept of the somatoform disorders--hysteria dressed up in modern garb-- that allows them to do so. ~ Maya Dusenbery

THIS DEATH sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a Rosenberg case because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. There had to be hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war budgets. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna give five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for Contempt of Court, but we're gonna kill ya! ~ Julius Rosenberg

Not only is the actual word "hysteria" gendered - it once referred to an exclusively female disease, a mental illness thought to be caused by a malfunctioning uterus - there is a very long history of critics using accusations or innuendo about women's mental health or emotional stability in order to shut down their political voices. ~ Sady Doyle