Quotes About Conflict

The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.

Oh, don't let him pull that 'Pearl Harbor I'm going off to war' stuff on you.

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much."

As one American major said, in a successful attempt at attaining history, "We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it."

How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?

for years now there had been no country here but the war.

you could also hear the other, some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying, 'All that's just a load, man. We're here to kill gooks. Period.' Which wasn't at all true of me. I was there to watch.

We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.

And they were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be?

Not only does free trade have nothing to do with democracy, but in most cases throughout history the two have been inimical. Free trade prospered only at the expense of democracy and the freedom of the majority.

These acts recall the 1971–72 "Chicken War" between America and Europe, and the grain embargo that quadrupled wheat prices outside of the United States. It was this embargo that inspired OPEC to enact matching increases in oil prices to maintain terms-of-trade parity between oil and foodstuffs. The "oil shock" was simply a reverberation of the U.S. grain shock.

it is possible to cause more trouble with a rouble than with a club; it is only political economy that does not want to know it. — Leo Tolstoy, What Shall We Do Then? (1886)

Economics ultimately is political economy. To claim that it is "disinterested" and scientific is to cover up its political motives. The entire history of political economy has centered on the conflict between reformers seeking to free society from rentiers – landlords, creditors and monopolists – and the reaction by these wealthy vested interests to maintain their grip on the status quo that favors them.

Money, endless money, is the sinews of war," wrote Cicero in his Philippics (43 BC). Not only money, but credit, too.

Indeed, warfare became financialized long before industry or real estate.

But, the source explained, this fit Putin's larger strategic vision: "to destroy NATO, destroy the European Union, and seriously harm the United States.

Non-retaliation, for Paul, is not an option for peacemakers in Christ; rather, it is the way of Christ.

No matter who won this battle, a race would be wiped out.

People who fight fire with fire end up with only the ashes of their own integrity.

The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.

The real after-effect result was that the whole of the Middle East united against Israel, which no one can support anymore.

Like any man who has two masters with opposing interests, he was torn between them.

He kept the gun in his lap as he drove, and he prayed. It was the strangest prayer he'd ever offered. He asked for strength to do the wrong thing, and then forgiveness for doing it.

Trump, tenants said, tried to force them out by annoying them. He proposed to move homeless people into at least ten vacant apartments; the city declined the generous offer. Maintenance workers ignored leaky faucets and broken appliances and covered up windows of empty apartments with ratty tinfoil. A tenants' group accused Trump of harassment, but he denied all. "Let me tell you something about the rich," he said. "They have a very low threshold for pain." After