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Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.
Alfred Hitchcock
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Fear is a universal experience that often stems from childhood fears, manifesting in different forms as we grow.

In this quote, Alfred Hitchcock highlights the persistent nature of fear throughout our lives. He draws a parallel between childhood fears, such as those depicted in the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, and the adult fears we face, suggesting that while the sources of our fear may change, the fundamental experience of fear itself remains constant and deeply ingrained in our psyche.

Themes

FearChildhoodCouragePsychologyRoots

In practice

Example use cases

During a motivational speech about overcoming adversity, one might refer to Hitchcock's quote to illustrate the importance of addressing fears.

More from Alfred Hitchcock

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
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Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.
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I can't read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.
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I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.
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Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
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There is something more important than logic: imagination
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