Quotes About Conflict

In Desmond Ryan's inspired phrase, there continued the 'long wrestle between ghosts and realities with all the stored-up spleens of five years flaming through the rhetoric'.

Denied the status of belligerents, the Volunteers knew that they fought in the likelihood of execution if captured under arms, or even without them, depending on whose hands they fell into.

But they put up such a fight, particularly in Cork, Clare, Tipperary, Longford, Limerick and Mayo, that they tied up well over 50,000 troops and drove the RIC out of all but the most strongly fortified barracks in the larger towns.

Most of the group escaped the fighting, de Valera getting away in a Red Cross ambulance

There was Brigade Major Montgomery, later Field Marshal Montgomery of El Alamein, who wrote of his Irish experiences: 'My whole attention was given to defeating the rebels. It never bothered me a bit how many houses were burned.

success in governing depends on well-contrived antagonisms in the economic and social structure of the state.

Of course, had the British Army been used in a more all-out fashion, concentration camps, air raids, artillery bombardments and the rest of it, the result might have been different.

The Committee found two problems: On the one hand the Government was committed against any solution which would break with the unity of the Empire. On the other, it was committed that Ulster must not be forced under the rule of an Irish parliament against its will.

I assent to this proposed Bill as effecting an ingenious strengthening of our tactical position before the world. I am absolutely satisfied that the Sinn Feiners will refuse it.

The tiny handful of Volunteers – probably no more than three or four thousand strong countrywide – with their revolvers and shotguns began to paralyse the entire British system, or so it seemed.

the British position was so untenable morally that they could not use their Army properly and were never able to put forth their full military might.

Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.

It has been done as part of the Boycott work until this affair in the North – these murders and so on – is stopped.82

I know for a good many months we did as much as we could to get property destroyed. I know that if a good deal more property was destroyed... I know they think a great deal more of property than of human life.

At the Parliamentary level Collins privately explored every avenue open to him to bring down the Northern Administration.

Three Protestants were shot at Dunmanway and over the next week the latent sectarianism of centuries of ballads and of landlordism (described in Chapter 1) claimed a total of ten Protestant lives.

In all my life I have never experienced such orgies of murder, arson and looting as I have witnessed during the past 16 days with the RIC Auxiliaries. It baffles description. And we are supposed to be officers and gentlemen.

We can be for peace without supporting the enemy. We can be against this war without rooting for the other side.

I can't believe you'd even make such a suggestion!" Devona's eyes flashed dangerously. Magilla laughed. "What part of 'I'm a demon' don't you understand?

But there's a lot to be said for a good war, you know. Like a forest fire, it can be a cleansing force, burning away old, tired wood and making room for invigorating new growth." She flashed a smile. "Besides, it's fun!

We're not going to lose it. That's all there is to it," Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. "We can't lose. We can lose an election, but we're not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never.

They said Indonesia was a failure," Al Pope reflected bitterly. "But we knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn't even know what Communism meant.

There weren't any moderates left in the government of Iran.

and throughout the summer and fall of 2002, the president and his aides prepared the battlefield of the American mind with apocalyptic warnings about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction: Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons, and it could build a nuclear weapon in a few years. The alarms were terrifying, and utterly false. The cause for war was an illusion.