Quotes About Conflict

His mind was on patriotism not being enough, politics not being enough, producing, consuming, all amounting to little in the climate of endless violence.

A six-foot-tall man and a ten-pound monkey are pretty evenly matched in a stand-up fight. The monkey will be all over the man. By the end of the fight, the man may need hundreds of stitches, and could be blinded.

In ten days and 1,600 sorties the Twentieth Air Force burned out 32 square miles of the centers of Japan's four largest cities and killed at least 150,000 people and almost certainly tens of thousands more.

The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy; but when a "bomb" is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.

All war is immoral. Logically, the 100 percent pacifist has the only impregnable position.

mid-June 1915, "the wind was favourable and we discharged a very poisonous gas, a mixture of chlorine and phosgene, against the [Russian] enemy lines. . . .344 Not a single shot was fired. . . . The attack was a complete success."345

Man is not satisfied with a happy idyllic life: he has the need to fight and to encounter danger.

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our 'demonstration' of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia.

The power the old exert over the young is the power to send the young to war -- flesh in its perfection dropped into a hellish maze of stimulus and response in order to defend an old man's phrase. A phrase! What? The American way of life? Yes. It galls me to say it, but yes. This paragraph costs me nothing. And yet I know it cost the life of a boy or a girl with a ready body and a mind not ripe. N one will come to question me this evening.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that "us-and-them" seeing, and the dualistic thinking that results, is the foundation of almost all discontent and violence in the world.

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.

With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.

life seems to be a collision of opposites.

Even with all the best intentions in the world, given our different temperaments, backgrounds, and the way we process our data and information, we are going to step on one another's toes. Two people with absolutely good will can deeply hurt one another. Good people hurt one another because we all come at reality in different ways. That's why, for Jesus, the only way to achieve union is through forgiveness, not through making sin impossible.

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

Just as the Spirit always makes one out of two, so the evil one invariably makes two out of one!

is actually undoing the fourth commandment of Moses, which tells us to "honor your father and mother"? This commandment is necessary for the first half of life, and, one hopes, it can be possible forever. As we move into the second half of life, however, we are very often at odds with our natural family and the "dominant consciousness" of our cultures.

Of course, to be honest and consistent, one must ask if "church family" is not also a family that one has to eventually "hate" in this very same way, and with the same scandal involved as hating the natural family.

Jesus was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day.

Christ can hold together everything. In fact, Christ already does this; it is we who resist such wholeness, as if we enjoy our arguments and our divisions into parts.

The offended ones feel the need to offend back those who they think have offended them, creating defensiveness on the part of the presumed offenders, which often becomes a new offensive—ad infinitum. There seems to be no way out of this self-defeating and violent Ping-Pong game—except growing up spiritually.

Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?

He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn't understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.