Quotes About Escalation

The war began with the geopolitical equivalent of a brush fire.

The stakes—what your protagonist is risking—should increase in significance as the story progresses.

Whenever I've had a problem with any female in this entire game, I will say your name... I'm going to say your government. I'm going to look it up. I'm going to say your mother's name, your father's name, your kid's name. I want you to know that I'm talking about you.

Kissing is not just kissing. It is a major escalation or de-escalation point in a powerful process of mate choice.

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we'd have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs." She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. "Big cats, too. They're faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.

An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight.

The smart money brings a gun to a knife fight. Reacher brought a hydrogen bomb.

Escalation in morality can lead to holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness.

The lesson of evolution is that struggle and competition are the only sculptors that can ensure a species reaches its highest potential. Only a struggle for the ultimate stakes can bring out the best on all sides, as each side is forced to adapt and improve in response to the other, in a constant escalation of potential.

The endowment and sunk cost effects live together in a way that amplifies escalation of commitment. Status quo bias adds to the mix of cognitive forces gaffing the scale.

But just because there are a lot of benefits to setting goals doesn't mean that there isn't a downside to them as well. As you might already suspect, clearly defined finish lines should come with a warning: Danger, you may experience escalation of commitment.

As you build things, whether they're train tracks, or bookshelves, or relationships, or essays that you've written for classes, the endowment effect gaffs the scale even more, further escalating our commitment to failing causes.

Yes—well they were having words and she tossed some sand in his face. So naturally he sat on top of her and rubbed her face in the sand. We were—electrified.

I just like getting bigger and bigger. Taking it to another level, even as far as features and production.

Military leaders, many of whom were students of counterinsurgency, recognized the dangers of an incremental escalation and the historical lesson that 'trailing' an insurgency typically condemned counterinsurgents to failure.

I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.

The second guy always gets caught, and that's why you have to initiate it instead of retaliating.

China tennis - we're getting bigger and bigger.

The last time you lost your cool like this, you ended up throwing Will Clarke off a rooftop.

One fault begets another; one crime renders another necessary.

The real demon is success-the anxieties engendered by this quest are relentless, degrading, corroding. What is worse, there is no end to this escalation of desire.

Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated.

The harder you crack down, the stronger the drugs become. The crackdown on cannabis in the 1970s triggered the rise of skunk and superskunk. The crackdown on powder cocaine in the early 1980s led to the creation of crack, a more compact form of the drug. Many drug users want and prefer the milder forms of their drug—but they can't get them under prohibition, so they are pressed onto harder drugs.