“There's a game out there, and the stakes are high.”

— Dalton Trumbo , book Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Got His Gun (1938)
Context: There's a game out there, and the stakes are high. And the guy who runs it figures the averages all day long and all night long. Once in a while he lets you steal a pot. But if you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose. And once you've lost there's no way back, no way at all.

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Dalton Trumbo 18

American screenwriter and novelist 1905–1976

Michael Burleigh (1955) American historian and writer

Source: The Third Reich: A New History (2000), p. 659

“When the stakes are high, bow down low.”

Beth Moore (1957) American evangelist

Source: Daniel: Lives of Integrity, Words of Prophecy - Member Book

“Business is a game, played for fantastic stakes, and you're in competition with experts. If you want to win, you have to learn to be a master of the game.”

Sidney Sheldon Master of the Game

Source: Master of the Game

“I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.”

Jean Giraudoux Amphitryon 38

Source: Amphitryon 38

“Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

“Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

[Sam Harris, 6 October 2005, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/there-is-no-god-and-you-_b_8459.html, "There is No God (And You Know It)", The Huffington Post, 2006-10-16]
2000s

“Whose game was empires and whose stakes were thrones,
Whose table earth, whose dice were human bones.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Age of Bronze, Stanza 3, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Note the situation is different when the player is permitted to vary his stakes. In this case there exist advantageous strategies, and the game depends on the strategy.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter VIII, Unlimited Sequences Of Bernoulli Trials, p. 200

“I did not design this game; I did not name the stakes. I just happen to like apples; and I am not afraid of snakes.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

“This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter to August Belmont (31 July 1832) http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln5/1:762?rgn=div1;view=fulltext in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln" edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume V, p. 350-351
1860s
Context: Broken eggs cannot be mended; but Louisiana has nothing to do now but to take her place in the Union as it was, barring the already broken eggs. The sooner she does so, the smaller will be the amount of that which will be past mending. This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.

“There's a game out there, and the stakes are high.”

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Dalton Trumbo 18

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