Quotes About Conflict

Sous le coup de la colère on veut tout envoyer en l'air; et puis on aime encore, cela nous prend presque par surprise.

The brain has conflicting goals: to provide you with information, and to reduce your anxiety about the worrying outcome. If you wanted Clinton to win in 2016, your brain achieved both goals by accepting the 30% figure but telling you it would not happen.

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

but President Harding told Secretary of State Hughes, "Frankly, it is difficult for me to be consistently patient with our good friends of the Church who are properly and earnestly zealous in promoting peace until it comes to making warfare on someone of the contending religion…"23

It has been estimated that the total of military and civilian casualties in all of Europe's domestic and international conflicts in the 100 years between 1815 and 1915 was no greater than a single day's combat losses in any of the great battles of 1916.

Having one child makes you a parent; having two you are a referee

People tend to humanize their pets and dehumanize their enemies.

Hate is the father of all evil.

You never really "won" an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future.

She was a stirrer of the pot, a lover of intrigue and distress, a creature who seemed to draw oxygen from the spectacle of people at each other's throat, everybody in a state of upset and talking about her.

Love affairs that start in blood tend to end up in blood.

Women can be kind of a blood sport.

Spengler's Universal Law #8: Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women. The

He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear.

This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.

Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it's just randomness.

Violence and care, in the Wendat case, were to be entirely separated.

One historian who went through fifty years of police reports about knife-fights in nineteenth-century Ionia discovered that virtually every one of them began when one party publicly suggested that the other's wife or sister was a whore.

If 'national character' can really be said to exist, it can only be asa. result of such schismogenetic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. if nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another.

Even, he argued, if we are all rational enough to understand that it's in our long-term interest to live in peace and security, our short-term interests are often such that killing and plundering are the most obviously profitable courses to take, and all it takes is a few to cast aside their scruples to create utter insecurity and chaos.

Whatever the case, the closest Hobbes himself came to suggesting this state really existed was when he noted how the only people who weren't under the ultimate authority of some king were the kings themselves, and they always seemed to be at war with one another.

war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others' suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?

this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality.

Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case.