Quotes About Conflict

Keep your fat face out of it, fart mouth

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we'll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us.

Better to give the man what he wanted and save the objections for the battles worth fighting.

The PCs were willing, but the powers that be didn't want to commit troops.

This is war, Father. I will never be free of you as long as you own this company and I am under your employ. I am done playing your little life lessons. It's time I taught you a few of my own.

Who else but a pacifist would attack somebody as little as Wiggin?

Why were they still on that planet? Why weren't they in ships, speeding away? They chose to stay, knowing we had that weapon, knowing what it did and how it worked, they stayed for the battle, they waited for us to come.

There are too many players in this game," said Ram Odin.

We saved our lives, Ender.' 'No,' said Ender. 'That's what we thought we were doing, and that's what we should be judged for – but what we really did was slaughter a species that wanted desperately to make peace with us, to try to understand us – but they never understood what speech and language were. This is the first time they've had a chance to find a voice.

Pacifism only works with an enemy that can't bear to do murder against the innocent.

Pacifism only works with an enemy that can't bear to do murder against the innocent. How many times are you lucky enough to get an enemy like that?

That's how war is fought, in case any of you have foolish ideas to the contrary. You don't fight with minimum force, you fight with maximum force at endurable cost. You don't just pink your enemy, you don't even bloody him, you destroy his capability to fight back. It's the strategy you use with diseases.

So when war can't be avoided, you fight in such a way as to reveal to the enemy how war is destroying him. When he finally sees it, he stops.

The human race has always produced a vast surplus of human beings and of wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop.

In wartime, commanders have always had to learn the concept of "acceptable losses." But those who keep their humanity never really accept the idea of acceptability

There are hard wars and easy wars. It's easy to conquer a country whose people hate their own government more than they hate the invaders. It's hard to fight a war when your army knows that back home, their families are rooting for the other side.

They gave us the stardrive we used to get to them, and the weapon we used to kill them. They gave us everything.

If you can understand why he's biting and remove the conditions that make him bite, sometimes that can solve the problem as well. The dog isn't dead. He isn't even your enemy.

I think Russia agreed to it because they're facing a revolt of the Islamic States.

There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you.

Because Garden cannot survive one-nineteenth slave and eighteen-nineteenths free. A house divided against itself cannot stand!

Nobody wants xenocide, but if it happens, I want to make sure it's the other guys that disappear. When it comes to war, human is human and alien is alien. All that ramen business goes up in smoke when we're talking about survival.

Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him.