Threat Response Quotes & Sayings

A threat need not provoke a response if it is not taken up. — Paulo Coelho

What must be understood is this: attackers attack as a form of defence. It is their instinctive response to threat, real or perceived. It may be desperate or it may be habit, or both, when desperation becomes a way of life. Behind the assault hides a fragile person. — Steven Erikson

But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime. — Kate Millett

Global warming is not a threat. But environmentalism's response to it is ... Even if global warming is a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization will have no great difficulty in coping with it-that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired. — George Reisman

Mindfulness has never been more important considering how the events of the world move in such an accelerated, frantic time. Our attention goes from here to the next thing to the next thing, and we're triggered from one response of fear to one of connection to the threat of loss. — Barnet Bain

Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term health issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

In response to [the Philistine] threat [in the ninth century B.C.], the Hebrews could no longer rely on the leadership of 'judges,' ad hoc military leaders (some of them, peculiarly, women; perhaps reflecting as feminists claim, and earlier matriarchal society). — Norman F. Cantor

Extroversion: response to reward Neuroticism: response to threat Conscientiousness: response to inhibition (self-control, planning) Agreeableness: regard for others Openness to experience: breadth of mental associations — Gretchen Rubin

Imagine experiencing pervasive and perpetual sensations of dread and shame, the sort of visceral response that you might have when your body reacts to a physical threat. Envision how distressing it would be if you experienced these exact same feelings after viewing yourself in a reflective surface or a photograph. Imagine what it might be like if your body was the source of extreme feelings of anger, disgust, anxiety, fear, and hopelessness. Try to visualize how it might be if viewing your outward appearance triggered a reaction usually associated with a perilous situation, and how disconcerting it would be if every time you looked at yourself you experienced primal feelings of terror. If you have not had such an experience, it is probably quite difficult to comprehend how it is possible to have such a reaction to one's own body. This, though, is the very tormenting reality for individuals who suffer from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). — Winograd Arie M

If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they "smell" it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. Insect pests are dealt with slightly differently. The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be "tasted" by the leaf being eaten. In response, the tree sends out a chemical signal that attracts predators that feed on that particular leaf-eating insect. Life in the slow lane is clearly not always dull. But — Peter Wohlleben

Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation. — Bell Hooks

The purpose of such propaganda phrases as "war on terrorism" and attacking "those who hate freedom" is to paralyze individual thought as well as to condition people to act as one mass, as when President Bush attempted to end debate on Iraq by claiming that the American people were of one voice. The modern war president removes the individual nature of those who live in it by forcing us into a uniform state where the complexities of those we fight are erased. The enemy-terrorism, Iraq, Bin Laden, Hussein-becomes one threatening category, something to be defeated and destroyed, so that the public response will be one of reaction to fear and threat rather than creatively and independently thinking for oneself. Our best hope for overcoming perpetual thinking about war and perpetual fear about both real and imagined threats is to question our leaders and their use of empty slogans that offer little rationale, explanation or historical context. — Nancy Snow

Rogue states are the main threat to peace and freedom, and they require a strong, comprehensive policy response - a policy that I call 'rogue state rollback,' in which our goal is not simply to contain rogue regimes, but to drive them from power. — John McCain

In the right circumstances, MDMA reduces or sometimes eliminates the neurophysiological fear response to a perceived threat to one's emotional integrity ... With a barrier of fear removed, a loving and forgiving awareness seemed to occur quite naturally and spontaneously. — George Greer

Anxiety is a complex emotional response that's similar to fear. Both arise from similar brain processes and cause similar physiological and behavioral reactions; both originate in portions of the brain designed to help all animals deal with danger. Fear and anxiety differ, however, in that fear is typically associated with a clear, present, and identifiable threat, whereas anxiety occurs in the absence of immediate peril. — Catherine M. Pittman

biological, instinctual, unconscious response to threat or violation. And it can actually be the very thing that saves your life. In freezing, the human body enters an altered state in which little to no pain is experienced. — Rachael Maddox

One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image. — Timothy Garton Ash

We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response. — Sam Nunn

Enlightened sexism is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism - indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved - so now it's okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. — Susan J. Douglas

While in general I avoid the use of torture - torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance - the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as the Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the Switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine. — William S. Burroughs

Love always precedes repentance. Divine love is a catalyst for our turning, our healing. Where fear & threat may gain our compliance, love captures our heart. It changes the heavy burden of the "have-to's" of imposed obedience to the "get-to's", a joyful response to the genuine love of God. It is in the security of this love we find Sabbath (rest). — Michael M. Rose

When people encounter a significant threat, a response called "threat rigidity" sets in. The instinct of threat rigidity is to cease being flexible and to become "command and control" oriented - to focus everything on countering the threat in order to survive. — Clayton M Christensen

crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That's - strikes in England, - riots in the Northern US, - and the threat of slave insurrections in the South. — Anonymous

The insistence on complete certainty about the full details of global warming-the most serious threat we have ever faced-is actually an effort to avoid facing the awful, uncomfortable truth: that we must act boldly, decisively, comprehensively, and quickly, even before we know every last detail about the crisis. Those who continue to argue that the appropriate response is merely additional research are simply seeking to camouflage timidity or protect their vested interest in the status quo. — Al Gore

the German Workers' Party. Their principal goal, declared its leader in 1913, was 'the maintenance and increase of [German] living space' (Lebensraum) against the threat posed by Czech Halbmenschen ('half-humans'). This was in fact a response to the creation of a Czech National Socialist Party in 1898. — Niall Ferguson

I urge you strongly not to give Stop the Goodreads Bullies traffic. Their initial postings were all doxings of reviewers ... There are a lot of arguments on the legitimacy of doxing, but I think most reasonable people would agree that the response to a negative - not even libelous - review should not be the open posting of a reviewer's address. That's not the counter of speech by more speech, but with an implicit threat. It's not that you're wrong, and here's why; it's that I know where you live. — G.R. Reader

Consider the choice someone might give you to eat either apple pie or grub worm pie. Which would you choose? Presumably, you would select the former. Was your choice determined? Of course, this is apparent from the predictability of your choice. And what determined your choice was such causal influences as your desire to eat something you like and your natural aversion to eating worms. But, now, was your choice free? Again, the answer is yes. You were free because you were not externally compelled to give a pro-apple-pie response. However, had something so compelled you, such as the threat of physical violence or manipulation of your vocal cords, then you would not have acted freely.2 This — Scott Christensen

The only acceptable response to the threat of lethal violence is immediate and savage counterattack. If you resist, you just may get killed. If you don't resist you almost certainly will get killed. It is a tough choice, but there is only one right answer. — Jeff Cooper

Our fumbling government's response since Beirut - during both Republican and Democratic administrations - has been to cut and run, or to flat ignore this growing threat, apparently hoping it would go away. — David Hackworth

With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset set instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who? George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved. — Carol S. Dweck

Every child learned the skills and attitudes that are valued by their own class culture. But outside of the family unit, all skills were not considered to be equal. Modern American culture, Lareau wrote, valued the qualities that middle-class children were developing over the ones that poor and working-class children were developing. "Central institutions in the society, such as schools," Lareau wrote, "firmly and decisively promote strategies of concerted cultivation in child rearing. For working-class and poor families, the cultural logic of child rearing at home is out of synch with the standards of institutions." In one poor household Lareau studied, for example, family members didn't look each other in the eye when they spoke - an appropriate response in a culture where eye contact can be interpreted as a threat, but ill-suited to a job interview where a firm handshake and a steady gaze are considered assets, and a failure to make eye contact can make a candidate seem shifty. — Paul Tough

What we did, what every president since Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat assessment. — Max Brooks

I resent 'experts' who have never faced deadly threat, yet who tell me - and you - that we should not consider a response of equal power against those who would threaten our lives. — Massad Ayoob

Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real ... — John F. Kerry

related type of argument is that we ought - rather callously - to welcome small and medium-scale catastrophes on grounds that they make us aware of our vulnerabilities and spur us into taking precautions that reduce the probability of an existential catastrophe. The idea is that a small or medium-scale catastrophe acts like an inoculation, challenging civilization with a relatively survivable form of a threat and stimulating an immune response that readies the world to deal with the existential variety of the threat.15 — Nick Bostrom

We have to deal with this new type of threat in a way we haven't yet defined ... With a low-probability, high-impact event like this ... If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. — Dick Cheney

It's ... dangerous for someone like me to be out in the open.' As if in response, my wings started to flutter beneath their shroud. I gave the cloak a good yank.
'Someone like you? Someone different, you mean?'
I shrugged. 'Yes,' I answered quietly, suddenly shy.
'So, is it dangerous for us or for you?'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean, are you the threat, or are we? — Leslye Walton