Quotes About Conflict

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

In war, good guys always become bad guys.

There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.

The pretense in disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two major parties. The reality is that there is a much bigger conflict that the two parties jointly wage against large numbers of Americans who are represented by neither party and against powerless millions around the world. (p. 65)

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

Crosses and gallows - that deadly historic juxtaposition.

How can you have a war on terrorism while war itself is terrorism!

Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English and virtually impossible to track down, the method was to feign peaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their corn wherever they chose, and then, just before harvest, fall upon them, killing as many as possible and burning the corn. . . . Within two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that day many times over.

the atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides.

It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.

Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations—consciously or not—that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.

Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war?

Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history. He became a hero of the War of 1812, which was not (as usually depicted in American textbooks) just a war against England for survival, but a war for the expansion of the new nation, into Florida, into Canada, into Indian territory.

The military conflict itself, by dominating everything in its time, diminished other issues, made people choose sides in the one contest that was publicly important, forced people onto the side of the Revolution whose interest in Independence was not at all obvious. Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations—consciously or not—that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.

party politics and religion now substituting for class conflict.

More important, there was a very painful thought in my head: those young Communists on the block were right! The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.

The Tonkin incident—the supposed attack on American destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats near the coast of Vietnam—became the excuse for the swift American escalation of the colonial war that the French had lost in 1954 and that the United States had taken over.

In the Mexican War, a skirmish between Mexican and American troops on the Texas-Mexico border led President Polk to state that "American blood has been shed on American soil," and to ask Congress for war. Actually, the encounter took place in disputed territory, and Polk's diary shows that he wanted an excuse for war so the United States could take from Mexico what the United States coveted, California and the whole Southwest.

When guns boom, the arts die.

At a certain point he startled me by saying, "You know, this is not a war against fascism. It's a war for empire. England, the United States, the Soviet Union—they are all corrupt states, not morally concerned about Hitlerism, just wanting to run the world themselves. It's an imperialist war.

They drew three lessons from the Pequot War: (1) that the Englishmen's most solemn pledge would be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; (2) that the English way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and (3) that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians took to heart.

A Yale professor of military history, Micheal Howard, writing in the New York Times )January 28, 1991) quoted the military strategist Clausewitz approvingly: The fact that a bloody slaughter is a horrifying act must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity.

We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war because they and the economic interests they represent benefit from war.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned.