Daily Inspiration Quote by Barbra Streisand

Fear is a strange flex for a celebrity, and Streisand knows it. Naming Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft isn’t casual partisan sniping; it’s a roll call designed to sound like a cast list of power, secrecy, and punishment. The repetition of “frightening” works like a drumbeat: she’s not arguing policy point by point, she’s describing a mood - the lived sensation of watching the state expand after 9/11 and realizing the people steering it seem unbothered by limits.

The context matters: early-2000s America ran on permanent emergency. Cheney’s shadow presidency, Rumsfeld’s swaggering Pentagon pressers, Ashcroft’s Justice Department pushing the Patriot Act and aggressive surveillance - this quartet symbolized a government that treated civil liberties as optional accessories. Streisand’s intent is to translate that institutional drift into a single, accessible emotion. Fear is legible even if you don’t know the legal architecture of detention or executive power.

There’s subtext in who she includes and how she frames them. She doesn’t say “wrong” or “misguided”; she says “frightening,” implying not mere disagreement but a threat vector - leaders whose instincts make the country less safe in a deeper sense. Coming from an actress, the line also flips the usual celebrity-politics script: instead of selling reassurance, she’s insisting that the scary part isn’t Hollywood fantasy. It’s governance with a taste for impunity.