"Fear is the highest fence"
About this Quote
“Fear is the highest fence” lands like a line of dialogue you can’t unhear because it turns something abstract into set dressing. Nichols, a screenwriter who spent his career watching characters run into invisible walls, chooses a fence instead of a prison: not bars enforced by law, but a boundary we accept, maintain, even repair ourselves. “Highest” is the sting. It implies fear doesn’t just block you; it outcompetes every other barrier - class, distance, rules, even common sense - because it recruits the imagination. You don’t have to build a taller fence when the mind will add extra feet on its own.
The intent feels practical, not mystical: a warning about how people can be controlled (or self-controlled) with minimal force. Fear is cheap to deploy and expensive to dismantle. It makes crowds police one another, makes individuals preemptively comply, makes the risky choice feel morally irresponsible. The subtext is that the fence is rarely erected by a single villain. It’s social. It’s a neighborhood of anxieties that become architecture.
Nichols’ context matters. He lived through the Great Depression, a world war, and the rise of mass propaganda; he also publicly clashed with Hollywood’s power structures and the chilling effect of political suspicion. In that era, fear wasn’t just personal psychology - it was a production tool, a headline strategy, a loyalty test. The line works because it’s cinematic and civic at once: it describes the shot (a character stopping at an unseen boundary) and the system (a society keeping itself in line).
The intent feels practical, not mystical: a warning about how people can be controlled (or self-controlled) with minimal force. Fear is cheap to deploy and expensive to dismantle. It makes crowds police one another, makes individuals preemptively comply, makes the risky choice feel morally irresponsible. The subtext is that the fence is rarely erected by a single villain. It’s social. It’s a neighborhood of anxieties that become architecture.
Nichols’ context matters. He lived through the Great Depression, a world war, and the rise of mass propaganda; he also publicly clashed with Hollywood’s power structures and the chilling effect of political suspicion. In that era, fear wasn’t just personal psychology - it was a production tool, a headline strategy, a loyalty test. The line works because it’s cinematic and civic at once: it describes the shot (a character stopping at an unseen boundary) and the system (a society keeping itself in line).
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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