Emotional Escalation Quotes

How can you have a reasonable debate with people who are constantly changing the panic? They are moving the panic to a greater wave of hysteria?

The bare recollection of anger kindles anger.

Most men don't seem to get that telling a pissed-off woman to calm down is like throwing gunpowder on a fire.” ~ Liberty Jones

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

Being alone with fear can rapidly turn into panic. Being alone with frustration can rapidly turn into anger. Being alone with disappointment can rapid turn into discouragement and, even worse, despair.

I'm very much aware of the dangers of becoming a cliche. Mr. Anger, someone who gets meaner, angrier on record.

Oh yeah, oohing and ahhing, that's how it always starts, but later there's the running and screaming.

... passion, once unleashed, has a way of unleashing other passions -- a principle adhered to as firmly by the police force of any large modern city as by the Greek tragedians.

Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.

Impatience turns an ague into a fever, a fever to the plague, fear into despair, anger into rage, loss into madness, and sorrow to amazement.

I mean people are really crazy about minor decrements down. And then, if you act on them, then you get into reciprocation tendency, because you don't just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity, and the whole thing can escalate. And so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you're losing or almost getting and not getting.

But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.

The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.

Feeling alone makes negative feelings worse. When you feel alone, frustration quickly can become anger, fear quickly can become panic.

Once nations get emotional, their relationships can change at bewildering speed.

The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.

No sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage.

There's an inverse relationship between my temper and my ability to control my accent. If you hear me say 'Fiddledeedee', run for the hills, because I'm getting ready to take out bystanders.

The more attention you give to your negative feelings, the more they grow, so I think things just start to blow totally out of proportion.

The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you just can’t stop!

They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won't be able to be outraged anymore.

When you're trying to sustain a high level of intensity and panic, sometimes it actually helps to have something happen that makes you really afraid because even if in real life it wouldn't make you that scared, to take that little bit of fear and be melodramatic about it, I guess, and convince yourself that it's worse, can be effective.

It's really easy to take something small and make it big in your head and fight against it.

There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.