Quotes About Conflict

If Putin wants to knock the hell out of ISIS, I'm all for it 100 percent and I can't understand how anybody would be against that.

If I'm insulted I will counterattack, or if something is unfair, I will counterattack, but I don't feel like I insult people. I don't want to do that. But if I'm attacked, I will counterattack.

I'd been conflict-phobic my entire life because I didn't want to lose my inner core of peace.

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

John Kerry can be absolutely ruthless. I would not want to be on his enemies list when he's ready to go after you.

Assassinating someone is another way of saying I care, just not in the way they'd want you to.

Except if it has some historical meaning for them to have Tibet under their control. I don't understand why [ Chinese] want it so much.

Oh, gosh, Olive. I'm so embarrassed." "No need to be," Olive tells her. "We all want to kill someone at some point." (179)

When you love someone, you don't want to hurt them, even if they deserve to be hurt. When you love someone, you want to hurt them, even when they don't deserve to be hurt.

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power - power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

Only the fool wants to go into battle to beat someone for the satisfaction of beating someone.

You must consider that there is opposition from other human beings and also non-physical forces that don't want you to succeed.

Peace is the time of waiting for war. A time of preparation, or a time of wilful ignorance, blind, blinkered and prattling behind secure walls.

The act of taking offence becomes a weapon, and its wielder feels empowered by the false indignation.

There is only one thing worse than arguing with a drunk,' Faradan Sort said, 'and that's arguing with a drunk who's right.

A civilization was the means by which too many people could live together despite their mutual hatred.

Corporal Clasp crawled up beside him. 'That's one of those Fuckeral's, isn't it?

The righteous will claim sole domain on judgement. The righteous are the first to make hands into fists, the first to shout down dissenters, the first to bully others into compliance.

The world was full of lies. And people keep telling us we need them, all in the name of peace. But the peace we got was poison.

Life was a war against a thousand enemies, from the sustenance carved from nature to the insanity of a people's will to do wrong in the name of right.

There was, in his mind, no truer measure of stupidity than to imagine that the world could be reduced to two sides, one facing the other with fangs bared, brandishing weapons and hurling hate at the enemy. Things were never so simple.

You and I, we have seen all of this before, the manner in which two opposing forces – no matter how disparate their origins, no matter how righteously one begins the conflict – end up becoming virtually identical to each other.

What frightened Paran most, these days, was that he had grown used to being used. He'd been someone else so many times that he saw a thousand faces, heard a thousand voices, all at war with his own.

A civilization at war chooses only the most obvious enemy, and often also the one perceived, at first, to be the most easily defeatable. But that enemy is not the true enemy, nor is it the gravest threat to that civilization. Thus, a civilization at war often chooses the wrong enemy.