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Identity & self

What do you fear most?

256 answers answered between 1999 and 2026 one of 5 in The Proust Questionnaire

Originally asked

Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire

The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

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On the record

Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.

Read by field Everyone Science and medicine 1 Arts and letters 222 Politics and public life 19 Business and finance 7 Sport 7
Read by age Any age Before thirty 2 In their thirties 20 In their forties 28 In their fifties 34 In their sixties 45 Seventy and beyond 42
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John Lewis U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966
As a participant in the movement, as I was sitting in, I came to that point where I lost all sense of fear.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, Chicago, 10 June 2004 source ↗
Aung San Suu Kyi Leader of the National League for Democracy; Nobel Peace Prize laureate; State Counsellor of Myanmar, 2016–2021
To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.
Recorded Oslo City Hall, The Nobel Foundation, 16 June 2012 source ↗
Keir Starmer
Failure. I hate losing, particularly at football and politics. I play five-a-side every week – middle of midfield, barking orders. Some people say it’s the taking part that counts. I am not in that camp. It’s the winning that counts.
Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 August 2023 source ↗

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