Quotes About Conflict

It has been one of my difficulties, in arguing this question out of doors with friends or strangers, that I rarely find any intelligible agreement as to the object of the war.

The Israelis and the Palestinians don't know each other. They live right there, but they've become strangers. And it makes it much more difficult to make peace with a person you really don't know, and that's an obstacle in itself.

I embrace my rival, but only to strangle him.

The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how the still-green President John F. Kennedy scrambled to keep the U.S. from entering into a full conflict with Cuba.

From a very strategic level, I believe the military is part of the solution to better outcomes around the world, but at a higher level, it's really about economies.

In practice, the U.K.'s most consistent strategic objective in relation to Iraq was to reduce the level of its deployed forces.

The Nemtsov report claimed that to that date some 170 Russian regular soldiers, as opposed to volunteers, had died, and a large proportion of them died in and around Ilovaysk.

The rebels, however, wanted them out of two places in particular—Donetsk airport and the town of Debaltseve, through which local roads and railways run. The airport, named for the famous composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), who was born nearby, was gleaming and new, having been among those rebuilt for the 2012 Euro soccer championships.

Debaltseve were certainly defeats for the Ukrainians, but the fact that it took the rebels and the Russians months to achieve these victories demonstrated two things: first, that the Ukrainians were no longer disorganized and that their military was getting stronger by the day; and secondly, that the rebels and the Russians were reaching the limits of what they could do unless there was a lot more help from Russia.

For as long as anyone can remember, the history of Kosovo has been a battlefield pitting Serbs against Albanians. Each believes different things because each has been taught different things, and as they reach further back into time it becomes easier to argue whatever they want in order to find support for their view of the present.

for Britain and the U.S. They expected them to give weapons to the Ukrainian army so it can better fight the Russians, because until now all they had given the country, said Nadya, was the equivalent of feeding "a fly to a dog"—in other words, nothing

short-lived German-supported Ukrainian state, which the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic had resisted. Now, she said, it was a ridiculous irony that Ukrainians were destroying statues of Lenin when they should be grateful to him.

The point is that it was something done by others against us. In Ukraine, as indeed in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975–79, it was not something quite so clearly done by others.

In the period from 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union was allied to Nazi Germany and supplied it with the raw materials it used to make war on the Western allies. After Hitler attacked the Soviet Union everything changed of course, but officially the Soviet account could only say that the war had begun in 1941.

Road racing imitates life, the way it would be without the corruptive influence of civilization. When you see an enemy lying on the ground, what's your first reaction? To help him to his feet. In road racing, you kick him to death.

For ten thousand years we have studied the Force and developed our society around and within it. Wars and conflicts have come and gone. We strive to keep the dark and the light, Bogan and Ashla, forever in balance. But now Ã¢â'¬Â¦ now there is something that might destroy us all.

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.

I was a coward. I went to the war.

So we had the classic Italian compromise, a theater of strife when all was actually agreed. Anarchy is rare in Italy, but legality is always up for renegotiation, especially if you can present yourself as hard done by

The resort to force is a two-edged weapon which has a persistent habit of recoiling on the user and which in the last analysis seldom achieves anything that could not be obtained by reason and peaceful means.

he moved that the press and public be excluded so that misunderstandings could be cleared up. Collins refused to let him get away with the ploy and read out the credentials which the plenipotentiaries had received, saying that the secret instructions should not have been read out without them.

The evidence, however, appears to be inescapable that, the civil war won

Collins would have had to resolve within himself the tensions of his dual role. Head of a democratic Government, head of a secret society which in fact regarded itself as a Government within a Government. Conspirator versus democrat. Destroyer versus builder. He might not have been able to resolve these conflicts and might have disintegrated in drink or disillusionment.

a local priest, Canon Cohalan of Bandon, preached a famous sermon in which he thundered: 'The day Michael Collins was killed where was de Valera?