Quotes About Conflict

We have a flabby public opinion which would wring its hands in anguish if we took the labor leader by the scruff of his neck, backed him up against a wall, and filled him with lead. Countries which consider themselves every bit as civilized as we do not hesitate about such matters for a moment. Whenever

but no, if she had been here, he would have been driven to take the side against her. This wasn't perversity, he would insist; he was trying to see the problem from all of its many sides, and argued against all persons who wanted to see only one side.

if we don't break down England's caste system, we'll find this war was hardly worth fighting." Lanny agreed with all that; but he wanted to shake his head sadly when the flyer went on to say: "There will be a different England after this war. Our people will never be content with the old life, after the sacrifices they have made." Lanny had heard exactly the same words from Alfy's father during World War I, before this youngster had been born.

couldn't say anything comforting, for he knew that civil wars are not polite; he knew, what these privileged people had never troubled to learn, the age-old wrongs which had set the fires of hatred to blazing in the hearts of wage-slaves.

The small island of Okinawa, close to Japan, had required nearly three months to capture; a hundred and twenty thousand Japanese had been killed or driven to suicide, and only eight thousand captured—which showed the kind of war it was.

The marriage would have been at once, if they had had their way; but this would mean that they would have to do without any wedding feast, and when they suggested this they came into conflict with the old people.

Franco has a few Spaniards, but mostly it's the Foreign Legion and the Moors who are being used to crush the Spanish people.

National Socialism versus true Socialism, racism versus humanity—that was the struggle between Satan and God in the modern world.

wartime it appeared that nobody wanted to see both sides of any question.

Brothers have fought against brothers, and fathers against sons, in all civil wars; and here was a new kind of war, spreading rapidly all over the earth: National Socialism against true Socialism, racialism against the brotherhood of humanity.

The man in the middle gets the bullets from both directions; but I suppose we have to take our stand there all the same.

He smiled gently, being sorry for her. "Mother dear, I am one of those unlucky people who have to stand in the middle and get the brickbats from both sides. I see the good in both and I see the evil. But if you point that out the fanatics on both sides want to kill you.

Armies marching and fighting all over Europe, all through the centuries—and Lanny could not recall ever having met a single peasant or workingman who liked war or expected to gain from it. War was a sport of ruling classes!

Where savage beasts in forest midnight roam, Seeking in sorrow for each other's joy. Even while he was helping to win a war, Lanny hated that war and all others; he hated the lies he had to tell fully as much as those he had to hear. He was a man with a divided mind, and this put him at a disadvantage with men like these Nazis, who were never troubled with doubts and had consigned all scruples to the dustbin of history.

It is obvious that when a nation turns its whole substance into war materials, as Germany is doing now, the time will come when that nation has to go to war—it can do nothing else because it is equipped for nothing else; and it must use its armaments or else be suffocated under their weight.

Generalissimo Franco was a soldier, a crusader for Christianity as he conceived it, but he was a poor administrator and no economist; his only conception of government was to kill all the people who did not agree with his ideas, or at least to shut them behind bars and feed them very badly. Carpenters and masons, steelworkers and miners, were dead or dying by the thousands, and did not contribute to the restoration of the shattered cities of Spain.

The best that anyone could do for the present was to build him a not too costly home in some part of the earth where there was no gold, oil, coal, or other mineral treasure, and which was not near a disputed boundary or strategic configuration of land or water. There with reasonable luck he might have peace within his own walls, and perhaps think some thoughts which might be helpful to a hate-tormented world.

You understand how it is worked—they send their bullies into the country to provoke disturbances, and when the police put them down, that's an atrocity.

Also, in each of the three nations was the same deadly and incessant struggle between rich and poor; between those who owned the land and working capital and those who did the hard labor for starvation wages.

I am like a man who looks at one side of a coin and then at the other, and they are different, and he can't decide which is the coin. I see co-operation, and that delights me; then I see repression, and that repels me. Which is the coin?

But you know how our kind of people are; we don't like violence and find it hard to believe in. Very sadly I'm beginning to wonder if we Socialists aren't caught between two millstones and destined to be ground up. We think that when we've educated the people and got a majority of the votes, the matter is settled. That is supposed to be the rule in the political game.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

The working-class world was split into factions, which spent the greater part of their energies in fighting one another instead of concentrating upon the common enemy.

The struggle inside France was between the Left, which had made an alliance with the Reds, and the Right, headed by the Comité des Forges, which wanted to break up this alliance, make friends with Germany, and join her in putting the Reds down for good.