Quotes About Escalation

There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.

Punch me in the face, I'll punch you twice as hard.

The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.

Oh, boy, Mike thought. It was going to happen between these two any second, right in the hospital hallway. Mike was a good six feet and pretty strong, but Brad and Jack were both taller, broader, angrier and not a shoulder injury between them. Mike was going to get hammered when they lost it and started pummeling each other. "Yeah,

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)

Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.

In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes:

The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

Problems that seem under control through manipulation tend to reappear somewhere else, but with greater severity than they were before.

Okay," I said, "then I'm sorry to inform you that I'm going to have to whack you over the head with this giant banana." "Not if I can whack you first!" said Terry, snatching the banana from my hands and whacking me over the head with it. That's when everything went black.

Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.

It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.

The bar raises as you go.

Every war makes other wars more likely.

Whoever tries to climb over our fence, we will try to climb over his house.

The more hate was permitted to lash out when there were ways it could have been checked, the more bold the hate became

The terrible truth is that our world has never established peace through victory. Victory establishes not peace, but lull. Thereafter, violence returns once again, and always worse than before. And it is that escalator violence that then endangers our world.

We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened. The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless. I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder.

We've protected thousands of people in Libya; we have not seen a single U.S. casualty; there's no risks of additional escalation. This operation is limited in time and in scope.

But physical aggression is often replaced by verbal abuse, and verbal insults seldom lead to physical aggression.

an amount that's been increasing by as much as six percent annually.

Not only is this teacher educating her children in violence, she also has to continuously escalate her own violence to keep control. Her method of teaching breeds disrespect and prejudice. Her students have been dehumanized.

We want to create a kind of cycle where casual gamers are gradually growing up to become passionate players.

The neighbor's kid was bullying my kid. Crossing the line. Threatening him all the time. I went over there to tell him what was going on. I had on flip-flops. I wasn't there to fight. It was a misunderstanding between a couple of dudes where one thing led to another.