The dead won't bother you, it's the living you have to worry about.

Attributed to John Wayne Gacy, the line contrasts the imagined threat of the dead with the real, immediate danger posed by living people. Read as a cynical aphorism, it suggests that fear of ghosts, corpses, or the past is misplaced; harm and betrayal come from those who are alive and capable of action. In the context of Gacy’s notoriety, the quote is often invoked to underscore a grim irony: the speaker himself embodied the danger he claims one should fear. Whether or not he truly said it, the phrase functions culturally as a warning about misplaced anxieties and the banality of real-world human violence.