big stick

This feeling of certainty and Scotland sit as well together as a hornets' nest and a big stick.

That is a big stick to beat his players with.

“Speak softly, and carry a big stick,” Theodore Roosevelt advised, though he never envisioned a successor would prove capable of obliterating cities half a world away in under half an hour.

But when Bush’s attorneys approached the Trust with “a big stick”, he said, they found that the organization was more than willing to work with them.

“We don’t go in with the big stick to begin with,” Morling said.