Quotes About Conflict

Ultimately these battles are about females, which means that the fundamental difference between our two closest relatives is that one resolves sexual issues with power, while the other resolves power issues with sex.

In a world divided by chimpophiles and bonobophiles, we all had a good laugh when Stephen peeled his banana. (62)

Our desire for sharp divisions is at odds with evolution's habit of making extremely smooth transitions.

naturalist and anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin asked in 1902: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?

That's another thing about the emotions: they make us take sides.

Priority of access to food is an important function of dominance. Since most dominance interactions and virtually all agonistic episodes [conflicts] between adult females and males occur in feeding contexts, I find much less meaning in dominance occurring in the non-feeding context. Moreover, there is no difference."26

A curious case that warmed this old ethologist's heart was that of a mathematics professor at a California university who was accused of peeing against a colleague's office door. The two male professors were said to have had a dispute that escalated to a "pissing contest." After someone had found puddles in the hallway, school officials set up a camera and captured the urinating professor on video.

With a bully for a leader, the group seems to wait for a challenger and eagerly support him if he stands a chance.

There is not occupation of territory on the one hand and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.

There is a dramatic conflict in what is commonly called the human sciences. Should we postulate a typical human reality and describe its psychic modalities, taking into account only the imperfections, or should we not rather make a constant, solid endeavor to understand man in an everchanging light?

The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native that there he alone is the master.

For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.

Party domination and State leadership are concepts incompatible with one another.

Yo maduraba mi venganza. No sabía cuál, pero iba a ser terrible, a la altura de los arranques de ira de papá que destrozaban cuanto se le ponía por delante. La casa. El cuerpo precioso de mamá. Mi dignidad y mi propia estima.

Perdican era el fruto de las entrañas de Rosette, que era de mi propiedad, así que me correspondía a mí tomar la decisión. A la fuerza, voté por la muerte (...) Tenía la sensación de estar traicionando a mi primer amigo del alma.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

Perhaps we would be able to understand the founding of the United States differently, I thought, if we explained it not only in terms of political conflict within the Anglo-American community or the working out of Revolutionary ideals, but as a consequence of the forty-year-long effort to subject the Ohio Country, and with it the rest of the Transappalachian west, to imperial control.

Tanaghrisson stepped up to where Jumonville lay. "Tu n'es pas encore mort, mon père," he said; Thou art not yet dead, my father. He raised his hatchet and sank it in the ensign's head, striking until he had shattered the cranium. Then he reached into the skull, pulled out a handful of viscous tissue, and washed his hands in Jumonville's brain.

I'm crucified between the sky of what I intend to be and the earth of my performance.

That's your best friend and your worst enemy - your own brain.

The most costly and protracted Middle East conflict of this era, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–8, had nothing to do with the Cold War, as cause or effect.

The NSA was hacking into Chinese networks to help defeat them in a war; China was hacking into American networks mainly to help enrich its economy. What made one form of hacking permissible and the other form intolerable? Even

Bush might have gone for the idea a few years earlier, but he was tiring of Cheney's relentless hawkishness.

Upton Sinclair dictum: it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.