Quotes About Conflict

global thermonuclear war

This is the right thing to do, I tell myself. But I don't believe it. This is another one of my mother's crazy ideas. I feel sick to my stomach. I want to pull my hand away, but I don't. I keep walking. Good Moose. Obedient Moose. I always do what I'm supposed to do.

I pretty much wanted to strangle her.

Xander hadn't talked to me since Sunday. Which was REALLY bumming me out. Like, usually when he says he'll never forgive me and I'm dead to him? He gets over it in like an hour. So this was pretty serious.

When two nations had a contradictory assessment of their own military power and the issue at state was vital to both nations, war was likely.

It is the problem of accurately measuring the relative power of nations which goes far to explain why wars occur. War is a dispute about the measurement of power. War marks the choice of a new set of weights and measures.

On the eve of each war at least one of the nations miscalculated its bargaining power. In that sense every war comes from a misunderstanding. And in that sense every war is an accident.

Wars can only occur when two nations decide that they can gain more by fighting than by negotiating. War can only begin and can only continue with the consent of at least two nations.

War and peace are not separate compartments. Peace depends on threats and force; often peace is the crystallisation of past force.

No wars are unintended or 'accidental'. What is often unintended is the length and bloodiness of the war.

The history of Australia, black or white, is not only the struggle between peoples but the struggle between nature and people. Nature tamed many of the settlers, sometimes defeating them, but people held many victories, sometimes at high cost.

Why did nations turn so often to war in the belief that it was a sharp and quick instrument for shaping international affairs when again and again the instrument had proved to be blunt or unpredictable? This recurring optimism is a vital prelude to war. Anything which increases the optimism is a cause of war. Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace.

Since every nation tends to believe that each of its past wars was fought in self-defence, a drawn war is more likely to be remembered as a victory.

Johnson signed on. He was resolved not to be "the president who saw Southern Asia go the way China went," he said. "I want [the South Vietnamese] to get off their butts and get out into those jungles and whip the hell out of some communists," he said. "And then I want 'em to leave me alone, because I've got some bigger things to do right here at home.

My God, I would never do anything to encourage Hanoi—I mean Saigon—not to come to the table because, basically, that was what you got out of your bombing pause, that, good God, we want them over in Paris. We've got to get them to Paris or you can't have peace….I just want you to know, I'm not trying to interfere with your conduct of it. I mean I'll only do what you and Rusk want me to do, but I'll do anything…

In 1858, when the emperor had two missionaries executed, France sent a fleet to seize the port of Danang. French naval forces took Saigon the following year and then forced the emperor to cede the three surrounding provinces to them. Over the four decades that followed, French forces captured Hue and Hanoi and steadily extended their power and influence until the French colonial government could officially declare in 1900 that the "pacification of Indochina" was complete.

Americans have been slaughtering one another in record numbers, in what can only be called America's secret war against itself.

fierce tea making in time of war,

More than 80 per cent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front.

The Germans dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on Stalingrad but most explosions contributed little more than reconfiguration of existing rubble.

The revolution is like Saturn—it eats its children.

Some part of me, I don't know which, contradicts the rest.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?