Quotes About Conflict

The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel ; perpetually changing postures and connexions ; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow ; kissing and scratching in a breath; — but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of the great French and English nations.

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but if you want to hurt someone...way down deep, use words.

If your knuckles are bloodier than your knees,then you're fighting the wrong battle.

American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.

Never bring a knife to a gun fight, I tell Mr. Crispy as I turn away from him. His right arm thinks about it for a moment, then falls off.

We shouldn't even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we're management, not heroes.

We're going to need swords: lots of swords.

A mother's love— Fuck love, Amber snarls, she wants power.

There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you're facing in your job involves napalm, if

I feel ill with emotional indigestion: I don't think I've ever felt for Mo the kind of raw, priapic lust I feel for Ramona, but Ramona is a poisonous bloom—off-limits if I value my life.

I don't have a license to kill, but I don't have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;

Imp froze as he rounded the corner onto Regent Street, and saw four elven warriors shackling a Santa to a stainless-steel cross outside Hamleys Toy Shop.

His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time travel as a weapon of mass destruction.

What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?

Revolutions (she'd long since learned) ran on committees just like any other government, once you got past the screaming-and-shooting stage.

Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration, too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet.

Idealism couldn't coexist with so many other people's ideals, betrayed in their execution by the tools they'd chosen.

When humans gather, crime is certain.

Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don't need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction.

After all, if there is one person a fanatic is predisposed to hate, it's a moderate who is almost but not completely aligned with their program.

Lockhart glares at him furiously. "Sitrep, then get out." "What was that—" Pete begins, his words already in motion before he processes Lockhart's reaction. "That was the last we'll hear from a very brave woman. Or a very stupid one. Damn.

War made the state, and the state made war

Politics could be cruel and heartless. And I was afraid, with the tensions in Ireland, that it could also be deadly.