Thomas Schelling Quotations

I have spoken to distance runners who, as exhaustion approaches, pick their stopping places a mile in advance, with the rule that any place more distant can be picked at any time before they reach the current target, and once picked even by the most fleeting resolve it becomes controlling.

Just as it may be easier to ban nuclear weapons from the battlefield in toto than through carefully graduated specifications on their use, zero is a more enforceable limit on cigarettes or chewing gum than some flexible quantitative ration.

I think I know whose side I'm on, and I'm sorry for him.

To go 60 years without any further use of nuclear weapons, I find astonishing. If I would have stood in front of an audience like this in 1960 and said we would finish the century without using nuclear weapons, no one would have credited me whatsoever.

The question was asked, 'What can seven divisions do to stop a Soviet attack? ... And the answer very explicitly was: They can guarantee that if the Soviets attack and kill or capture 300,000 Americans, the war won't end there.

This permeates life, ... I find it important in dealing with children, dealing with spouses, dealing with neighbors, dealing with customers.

Then, the major conflict was a very simple conflict.

It will be unusual to be deterred by small countries,

Social scientists have to either go out into the field themselves or be in very close contact with those in the field.

the mathematical frontier of a certain kind of social theory.

I do think it's often a mistake to call them climate skeptics. I think they're deniers, just as I think president Ahmadinejad of iran who claims not to believe that the Holocaust occurred.

I sometimes wish we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening-you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth-that would get people very concerned about climate change.

Nobody is going to give away the farm in Kyoto. It is not anybody's to give away. And even if the United States Senate would actually ratify a bad treaty, anything called for under the treaty would require legislation passed through both houses.

When I used to theorize about a nuclear standoff, I didn't really have to understand what was happening inside the Soviet Union. It is a lot harder now to build a theory that can encompass all the complications of today's conflicts.

I use game theory to help myself understand conflict situations and opportunities.

There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable.