Quotes About Conflict

Whatever she says to you, it's your job not to let her make you mad.

When you become angry at someone, your anger will actually have a power. You can hit somebody in a non-physical way and it can injure that being.

Then their quarrels, as he knew or would know sooner or later in the course of them, were about duality: They were two longing to be one, or one dividing relentlessly into two.

It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.

But do the Lords of War in fact hate the world? That would be easy to bear, if so. If they hated their children and the flowers that grow in the warming light, that would be easy to bear. For then we could hate the haters and be right. What is hard is to imagine the Lords of War may love the things that they destroy.

The theologian William E. Hull, worrying over the destructive animosities that divide religious organizations, asked, "How can we avoid the wrangling that breeds hostility?" And he answered: "By seeking clarity rather than victory" (Beyond the Barriers, p. 169).

War prevails over peace, I imagine, finally because it brings an apparently simple end to the great burden of civilized thought.

We are in the habit of contention—against the world, against each other, against ourselves. It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

If a soft answer turneth away wrath, maybe no answer stirreth wrath up.

The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature's world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans.

A hood is far from an ideal garment to wear in a fistfight.

The customers of The War (all of us, that is) purchase life at a great cost and yet lose it.

But there was no final firestorm, just a long night of negotiations where we tried to get our old selves back, to disown who we'd been for the past three months, because we'd been the wrong people all along.

I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.

Anne says that fear of death is the basis of all violence

It was hell, it was heaven, he was happy, he was scared to death, and he felt as if Satan were right there in this god-for-damned room and he was being butt-fucked by that NVR interrogator again in Muang Sing. Jesus wept, why had they done shit like that to him?

We human beings have a great defect, which is that we are all too often willing to both spread and enforce our ideas with violence.

We forgive sometimes, and sometimes we don't. One thing that's consistent is, at least in the early going, we love to punish and we need to find a villian.

They have been taught nothing but destruction and learned nothing except that a man's desires can be achieved simply by killing anybody who stands in his way.

and listening to the jackals squabbling

Never choose a battle; only fight if you cannot walk away.

One has sufficient enemies amongst men without deliberately seeking out others amongst the gods.

The stone falcons will fly afar. There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Mambos or the Monomatapas until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost.

Patriotism is a myth conceived by those old rogues to draw us into the infernal game. Let them fight as they will, but we want no part of it.