Quotes About Conflict

Of course, there is often nothing worse than war and violent death. But a truism that bears repeating is that peace, as a primary goal, is dangerous because it implies that you will sacrifice any principle for the sake of it.

The first victim of war is the truth.

The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa

Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging, the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the Indians, for their part, view the Chinese in similar Mahanian terms.

Civilizations often prosper in opposition to others. Just as Christendom achieved form and substance in opposition to Islam after the latter's conquest of North Africa and the Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, the West forged a definitive geopolitical paradigm in opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The age of comparative anarchy is upon us.

America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.

The United States, like any nation—but especially because it is a great power—simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embraced and accepted.

In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed.

Whereas devotees of globalization stress what unifies humankind, traditional realists stress what divides us.

Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it.

The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.

Croatia and Serbia will always seek to advance the interests of their ethnic compatriots in Bosnia, at the expense of each other and of the Bosnian Muslims, no matter who is in charge, democrat or autocrat. But

Human nature - the Thucydidean pantheon of fear, self-interest, and honor - makes for a world of incessant conflict and coercion.

It was the union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics that produced the basis for modern France.

One marker, which I would read a bit later on, tells the familiar story of Narcissa Whitman, trail-blazer and martyred missionary, who followed the north side of the Platte in 1836 on horseback, becoming the first white women to cross the American continent, and who, along with her husband, Marcus, was massacred by Cayuse Indians at their Protestant mission in 1847 in Walla Walla, Washington. (The Indians there were justifiably enraged at the whites for spreading measles to them.)

Robert D. Kaplan

One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.

A strong man tied to a weak man… When there is trouble, the strong man's strength counts for nothing.

You're praying, they're praying, and God, oddly enough, will come down on the side of the one with the most guns and most willing to use them. God always does.

Battle is a frightening thing, a terrible thing, but once you develop a taste for it…nothing else comes close.

Reunification's a fine idea, as long as you get rid of all the people that go to sleep at night praying that God strikes the other side dead

Most wars start with a lie, good wars, bad wars, they start with a lie, and the peace that comes afterwards, those promises of forgiveness and cooperation and fair play for all… those are lies too, lies wrapped in hope.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.