Escalation Quotes - page 2

Like a dance, conflict escalation generally requires the participation of both parties. (Brian Mistler)
Modern military planners often talk in terms of "threat spirals” when a given threat escalates and inspires a defensive countermeasure. Ideally you should anticipate your opponent's next escalation and take countermeasures, insulating yourself from the future threat. View quote
James Wesley Rawles
The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before. View quote
Noam Chomsky
This is not a letter on Pakistan. If it were, I could have written a small book entitled "Glimpses of Pakistan's history". Time does not permit it. The nation is gripped in her worst crisis, standing in the middle of the road between survival and disintegration. Since the birth of Pakistan, crisis has followed crisis in rapid escalation. Millions of lives were sacrificed to create this country. Pakistan is said to be the dream of Mohammad Iqbal and the creation of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam. Was anything wrong with the dream or with the one who made the dream come true? Opinions have differed and continue to differ. The next few years will most probably decide the issue, perhaps once and for all, and not without bloodshed. This process is not inevitable but the present policies of the ruling junta are driving this country towards a sad inevitability. View quote
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
For a number of years the deeds and actions of party and government bodies trailed behind the needs of the times and of life. The problems in the country's development built up more rapidly than they were being solved. The inertness and stiffness of the forms and methods of administration, the decline of dynamism in our work and an escalation of bureaucracy - all this was doing no small damage. Signs of stagnation had begun to surface in the life of the society. The situation called for change, but a peculiar psychology - How to improve things without changing anything? - took the upper hand. But that cannot be done, comrades. Stop for an instant, as they say, and you fall behind a mile. View quote
Mikhail Gorbachev
The first cause cannot have been an intelligence, let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshiped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. View quote
Richard Dawkins
There is particular danger at the moment that powerful political alignments in the United States are pushing strongly to exacerbate the developing crisis with Russia. The New York Times, which broke the story that the Kremlin had been paying the Afghan Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers, has been particularly assiduous in promoting the tale of perfidious Moscow. Initial Times coverage, which claimed that the activity had been confirmed by both intelligence sources and money tracking, was supplemented by delusional nonsense from former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who asks "Why does Trump put Russia first?” before calling for a "swift and significant U.S. response.” Rice, who is being mentioned as a possible Biden choice for Vice President, certainly knows about swift and significant as she was one of the architects of the destruction of Libya and the escalation of U.S. military and intelligence operations directed against a non-threatening Syria. View quote
Susan Rice