Old aphorisms never die, they simply fade with over-use, suffering a fate common enough with sacred text: oft repeated words of high sentence, seldom reasoned with, or mined for fresh meaning. To become a rhetorical flourish is not necessarily to remain a burst of illumination. Take, for example, Franklin D Roosevelt’s clarion call: ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ How often is the idea — the fear of fear — used to invite an examination of the nature, structure and manipulation of fear in our time?
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