Quotes About Conflict

For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so peace is infinitely more than the absence of war.

You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To

On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.

In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.

At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.

War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

And right then I submitted. I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried. It was loud now. Loud, hard crying.

He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it.

A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's puppy. 'What's everybody so upset about?' Azar said. 'I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy.

War is brutal. Civilians just suffer through it

And right then I submitted. I would go to war - I would kill and maybe die - because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried. It was loud now. Loud, hard crying.

His brain had the bends.

Martha shut her eyes. She crossed her arms at her chest as if suddenly cold and said she was glad he hadn't tried it. She didn't understand how men could do those things. What things? he asked, and Martha said, The things men do. Then he nodded. It began to form. Oh, he said, those things.

You can hide in someone else's rage - it blinds them

Is it the war that's done it to you? It's all war, she said. What is? I don't know. Everythin. Raisin a family, keepin yer head above water. Life. War is our natural state.

So we had some blues, me and Fintan. He said we were merely conducting civilised conversation. But sometimes it was like he didn't know how close he was to getting his head stove in. Or maybe he didn't care. Even so, everything was peaceful more or less. Until the wind came round from the north.

Jesus, I told meself, harden the fuck up. She heard me say that once, Mum. To me little cousin out by the laundry where he was bawling, his knee bleeding a tiny bit. She had that disgusted look on her face. What? I said. I didn't do nothin. You're no better than your father, she said. Listen to you, Jaxie, you sound just like him. I didn't talk to her for three days.

Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.

And let's not forget that George Washington "loved the Indians," according to Glenn Beck,126 never mind that he waged an annihilationist war against them. Indeed, Washington wrote to Major General John Sullivan, imploring him to "lay waste" to all Iroquois settlements, so that their lands may not be "merely overrun but destroyed."127

During this communication, Höglund learned that world peace was threatened because the USA and the USSR supposedly planned a war against China, and that he should go to the Bahamas to act as

Noble as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were, it was obvious before the ink was dry that they clashed with a central fact of everyday life in America: slavery.

Douglass's feeling of pride at choosing his own employment was soured somewhat when white laborers on the wharves threatened to quit if the boss hired a black man.