Quotes About Conflict

Davis and Stephens hewed to the same line: Southern states seceded not to protect slavery but to vindicate state sovereignty.

James M. McPherson

Thus the war was a struggle between two conflicting capitalist systems—one reactionary, based on slave labor, and fearful of change; the other progressive, competitive, innovative, and democratic.

It was a violent breakthrough against an older social structure.

The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.

We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."5

The Civil War started out as one kind of conflict and ended as something quite different.

The South was rebelling "not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. … Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.

It began to appear that something larger than a lady's thimble might be needed to hold the blood shed in this war.

James M. McPherson

Politics seemed to have fallen to a new wartime low of spite and pettiness.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Everybody got God on their side in war. Problem is, God ain't tellin' nobody who He's for.

The enemy was irony and truth and hypocrisy, that was the real enemy. That was the enemy that was killing him.

Ain't no worse thing in the world than fronting up against one of those, for a man with a cause, right or wrong, has got plenty to prove, and will make you suck sorrow if you get in the way of 'em wrongly.

Friendship was trouble in business.

My brothers and sisters were my best friends, but when it came to food, they were my enemies.

To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman's physical problem.

To not take sides was to take sides.

Anytime he said something about the will of God, it meant he weren't going to cooperate or do nothing but as he saw fit. He had no intentions of leaving Kansas Territory or turning himself in or paying attention to what any white soldier told him. He would tell a fib in a minute to help his cause. He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain't tellin' nobody who He's for.

If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God's sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot.

If I ever see you again, I'll send your ass hooting and hollering out my damn door.

She looked at me a long time, watching me sweep the floor, wearing that damn fool dress. I didn't say a word. Just kept on sweeping. Finally, she placed her small foot on the broom and stopped it. I had to look up at her then. Them eyes was staring down at me. I can't say they was kind eyes. Rather they was tight as balled fists. Full. Firm. Stirred. The wind seemed to live in that woman's face. Looking at her was like staring at a hurricane.

The engines slapped against each other like two steel balls on a Newton's cradle, neither soft nor giving ground, just the savage brutal equalising momentum of physics that only the crushing and dissolving of metal could resolve