Quotes About Escalation

Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.

If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice.

It's an upgrade arms race.

Combine perpetrators who have high self-esteem and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals, people who have children and lovers, "civilized" people who enjoy music and food and making love and gossiping as much as anyone else.

But I could feel resentment inside me, and I knew it would keep growing until it changed into something far more dangerous.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

I've always said I'm less interested in twists as I am about escalation.

Our basic problem is how do we stop the hot war on the ground in Ukraine, and not get into a more and more escalatory relationship with Putin.

Historically, aggression unanswered has led to more aggression.

You burn a man's pickup, and he's ready for war.

Even a fool could see that one didn't need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself; the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely.

One insult pocketed soon produces another.

An arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war.

Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.

You know," Cecily said, "you really didn't have to throw that man through the window.

Police conduct up to 80,000 SWAT raids a year in the US, up from 3,000 a year in the early '80s," writes Hanqing Chen, the magazine's reporter. The American Civil Liberties Union, cited in the article, found that "almost 80 percent of SWAT team raids are linked to search warrants to investigate potential criminal suspects, not for high-stakes 'hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.

I actually don't believe that the Administration wants war, but I also think they are all tactics and no strategy. Plan seems to be escalation with no endgame, and no understanding of how Iranian psychology actually works.

In reality, though, U.S. and Soviet psychological warfare programs each fed its rival's appetite for escalated conflicts, particularly in contested countries in the Third World. Scientific research programs on either side that claimed to be a defensive reaction to foreign intrigues were easily interpreted in the rival's camp as aggressive preparations for war.

It was interesting the way a small hate could grow inside a big hate and take it over.

You know," Cecily said, "you really didn't have to throw that man through the window.

And that, I now realize, is how you start the pattern of silences. So innocently and on such a small scale, and then once you open the door for them, they barge in and take on a life of their own.

War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about any one thing in particular.

Through his web of contacts in the highest levels of American business, with those corporate groups who form the bony structure of what is commonly called "the military-industrial complex, " Clifford was also absorbing another input: even the military-industrial complex was adamantly opposed to escalation.

I must have bitten Angus Young too, because his brother Malcolm walked up to me in a rage. I was wearing platform boots, and Malcolm's face was eye level with my belly button. You fucking bastard, he roared at my navel. You can bite my brother, fine! But if you fucking bite me, I'll bite your fucking nose off, you dog-faced faggot. I think I said something like you and what stepladder, because before I knew it, he was attacking me, climbing up my leg and clawing at my face like a crazed cat.