These hysteria quotes will inspire you. Hysteria is a term used to describe emotional excess, but it was also once a common medical diagnosis.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging hysteria quotes, hysteria sayings, and hysteria proverbs.
Best Hysteria Quotes
- “It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.” ~ Douglas MacArthur
- “Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.” ~ Elia Kazan
- “I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.” ~ Naomi Wolf
- “Hysteria is a chaotic and irrational emotional state caused by seeing how the world really operates.” ~ Robert Anton Wilson
- “To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.” ~ Roland Barthes
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“When you live in hysteria, people start thinking emotionally.” ~ John Mellencamp
- “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
- “Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “The charges of the hysterics are revealed for what they are: castles in the air built on misrepresentation, supported by unfounded fear, held aloft by hysteria.” ~ John Ashcroft
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“I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.” ~ Arthur Miller
- “Keep the people ignorant and afraid and control and power becomes a detail – a self generating byproduct of the people’s hysteria.” ~ Derek R. Audette
- “Hysteria takes too much energy to be maintained forever.” ~ Mira Grant
- “I exist in a state of almost perpetual hysteria.” ~ Sting
- “Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.” ~ Adolf Hitler
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“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.” ~ V. S. Naipaul
- “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 undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria.” ~ Frank Herbert
- “Every Left-wing hysteria of my lifetime has turned out to be untrue. Every single one” ~ Dennis Prager
- “As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person’s life. Hysteria trumps evidence.” ~ Carol Tavris , Hysteria quotes life
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“I did envisage being this successful as a player, but not all the hysteria around it off the golf course.” ~ Tiger Woods
- “Yes, you have cancer. Yes, your kids are on drugs. Yes, there is an elephant outside your tent. Now the question becomes, What are you going to do about it? Subsequent emotions may not be pleasant, but the hysteria stops. Hysteria accompanies an unwillingness to look at what is really going on; it promotes an unwillingness to look. We feel we are afraid to look, when actually it is not-looking that makes us afraid. The minute we look, we cease being afraid.” ~ Michael Crichton
- “When I’m saying hysteria, I’m referring to Freud, because all the women were coming to him with symptoms and seeking help, and he just called it hysteria.” ~ Cybill Shepherd
- “Rock ‘n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.” ~ Vance Packard
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“Music should be a collective magic and hysteria.” ~ Pierre Boulez
- “On stage, we just want to generate hysteria. We don’t care about looking cool or posing.” ~ Ade Edmondson
- “Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.” ~ Thomas Mann
- “I have stood on the front lines of the health care system as a doctor, patient and concerned parent. Those experiences have served as my guideposts throughout the struggle to reform America’s health care system. And it’s those same experiences that tell me that fear and election hysteria should not overshadow the reality of reform.” ~ Jim McDermott
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“Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!” ~ Bill Murray
- “I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness… I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.” ~ Federico Garcia Lorca
- “When we had gone down there you have to remember KISS had never been to Australia. So all the hysteria of KISS that was happening in the seventies was building up in Australia. These kids were waiting seven years to see KISS. I was lucky enough to be there when we went over. We got the key to the city, it was just great.” ~ Eric Carr
- “In fact, because of this deep desire for peace, the ruling class leaders of this land, from 1945 on, stepped up the hysteria and propaganda to drive into American minds the false notion that danger threatened them from the East.” ~ Paul Robeson
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“There had to be a hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war budgets.” ~ Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
- “But beyond the hysteria of phantom death panels, where is the abomination? Show me the provisions that will hurt consumers, because if you think a $110 billion a year tax break for working-class Americans to buy private health insurance is a government takeover, I welcome the debate.” ~ Jim McDermott
- “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
- “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
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“Art is our defense against hysteria and death.” ~ Theodore Roethke
- “Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it’s a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “From the cranberry cancer scare of the 1950s to the Alar-in-apples hysteria of the 1980s, from the “new ice age” of the 1960s to the “global warming” of the 1990s, environmental alarms almost always turn out to be false. Few non-political scientists fear ozone loss, global warming, or acid rain. These are just issues that some people hope to use to reorder the lives of the rest of us.” ~ Harry Browne
- “The Hollywood atmosphere of crises and continuous anxiety is a kind of hysteria which prevents people from thinking, and is not too different from the way dictators use wars and continuous threats of war as an emotional basis for maintaining their power.” ~ Hortense Powdermaker
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“Being in the moment means not being distracted by the melodrama and hysteria around you. Present-moment awareness allows solutions to emerge.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “Hysteria and degeneration have always existed; but they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitudes of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing on it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to civilization.” ~ Max Nordau
- “Controlled hysteria is what’s required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It’s agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.” ~ Arthur Miller
- “The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.” ~ Anthony Daniels
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“How can you have a reasonable debate with people who are constantly changing the panic? They are moving the panic to a greater wave of hysteria?” ~ Greg Gutfeld
- “I don’t think of my plays as steamy places where people display huge amounts of emotions. The feeling is underneath, which in my experience is where most feeling is. I don’t myself spend my life shouting in rooms, and I don’t really believe things in which people do spend their time in total hysteria.” ~ David Hare
- “Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.” ~ Paul Krugman
- “We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.” ~ Neal Stephenson
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“Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.” ~ Terence McKenna
- “Think about everything you read and everything you see. The one thing we can learn from all the horrible things that have happened in the last 15-20 years is that hysteria is the last thing we need. Cool thinking, pragmatism, and analytical thought are most important at this point.” ~ Greg Proops
- “The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios – the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […] That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.” ~ Adam Gopnik
- “We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.” ~ Sigmund Freud
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“Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it’s probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it’s the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.” ~ David Sedaris
- “The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that is causing such hysteria, we have only a movie made by a politician and mathematical models whose results change drastically when you change a few of the arbitrarily selected variables.” ~ Thomas Sowell
- “In the nineteeth century, knitting was prescribed to women as a cure for nervousness and hysteria. Many new knitters find this sort of hard to believe because, until you get good at it, knitting seems to cause those ailments. The twitch above my right eye will disappear with knitting practice.” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
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“… 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
- “Our imagination is larger than the world around us; we go beyond our limits. This used to be called ‘witchcraft,’ but fortunately things have changed, otherwise we would both already have been burned at the stake. When they stopped burning women, science found an explanation for our behavior, normally referred to as ‘female hysteria.’ We don’t get burned anymore, but it does cause problems, especially in the workplace. But don’t worry, eventually they’ll call it ‘wisdom.'” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country [America], for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “We campaigned across the South . . . without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got north to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan, and then Mrs. Ferraro . . . . Some people are making hysteria while I’m making history.” ~ Jesse Jackson
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“Climate change is the mother of all hysterias of the Left” ~ Dennis Prager
- “The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today’s Just Williams, today’s Huck Finns, today’s Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to the perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less).” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. … I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories – science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ~ Ray Bradbury
- “Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.” ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
