Quotes About Conflict

In a truly dreadful moment of lexical perversion, the US military's deployment of troops on the island of Grenada in October 1983 was presented as a 'pre-dawn vertical insertion'.

misadventures. 'A family', Johnson would later write, 'is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.'4

Pride and ego among various personalities is a sure way to cause friction and split up a group.

When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman target video game violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions that give rise to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies that make it harder for most of us to own our own homes, and the development practices which pave over the old grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear; rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement.

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

A conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla army wins if it does not lose.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong but when two rights confront each other.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.

If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America — and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six — is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.

What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military.

Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.

Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.

The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.

A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.

The highest form of warfare Is to attack [the enemy's] Strategy itself; The next, To attack [his] Alliances. The next, To attack Armies;

One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because "people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners.

Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation's strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.

A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop.

Where Western strategists reflect on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary.