Quotes About Stakes

Nothing is sacred to a gamester.

It was as if there were an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren't real—as if none of us dared to acknowledge what was at stake here.

The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.

In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue. That is why academic politics are so bitter.

You will carry into eternity the product of your investment in this life. Life is too short and the stakes too high to live mediocre lives.

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

Have you given us a character worth following?  - Have you created a disturbance in the opening pages? - Do you know the death stakes of the story? - Have you created a scene that will force the character into the confrontation of Act II? - Is it strong enough? Can the Lead character resist going into the battle?  - Does it occur before the 1/5 mark of your total page count?

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

One of the great things about playing a fallible superhero, one who doesn't necessarily have superpowers, is that the stakes are raised by the prospect of them perishing.

Religion's just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can't do the same when it comes to the crunch. These people are sheep. They'll do whatever their holy men tell them.

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

The stakes they play for in politics are paper and money. The chips they play with are your life.

politics can be an ugly game, and in a national election the stakes get higher while the tactics get lower.

Power and wealth are not two of my main stakes.

I don't know what the game was. I only know its name; they call it life. I'm not sure how it should be played. No one ever told me. No one ever tells anybody. I only know we must have played it wrong. We broke some rule or other along the way, and never knew it at the time. I don't know what the stakes are. I only know we've forfeited them, they're not for us. We've lost. That's all I know. We've lost, we've lost.

A warrior's honor is his willingness to play a game on which he stakes everything. His grandeur is directly proportional to how far he can fall.

I think that 'Hangover II' is as funny as 'The Hangover I,' honest to God, but I think that it's a little bit darker, and the stakes are a little bit higher.

The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper.

Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.

The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.

Because learning takes practice, we are more likely to get things right at small stakes than at large stakes. This means critics have to decide which argument they want to apply. If learning is crucial, then as the stakes go up, decision-making quality is likely to go down.