Quotes About Conflict

There was a time, in fact, I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals. Of course, it was, under the law of all civilized peoples, a crime for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding fire arms to bare knuckles, made it a legally innocent act?

Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.

I am not a pacifist. The main lesson I have learned in my dealings with Hitler is that one simply can't play poker with a gangster if one has no cards in one's hand.

Sometimes, he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight--start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

You were too young to fight in the last war, and I was too old. In some ways that made it worse.

This is the nightmare I have always dreaded. It's as if we've learned nothing from the last war and we are reliving August 1914. One by one the countries of the world will be dragged in - and for what?

more enemies, more honour.

if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight—start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

war was long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

The trouble with Lucious, he said, putting his feet up on the desk after this cousin has gone, is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.

The trouble with Lucius," he said, putting his feet up on the desk after his cousin had gone, "is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.

Violence is Inevitable.

Against the alchemy of two naked bodies in a bed in the darkness, and against all the complex longings and attachments and commitments such intimacy might arouse, he had nothing with which to fight.

Appeasement is simply an attempt to redress those same wrongs.

Sometimes,' he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, 'if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight – start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

Oh, what a world we make, oppressor and oppressed. Our world-- this violent ghetto, slum of the spirit raging against itself. We hate kill destroy in the name of human good our killing and our hate destroy.

World I have loved and loving hated, is it your sickness luxuriating in my body's world?

We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We're the bloody infantry.

Pain and sickness and hunger and fighting—there's no need for any of it. It's as foolish as those little monkeys.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.

The University of Michigan's Karl Weick advises, "Fight as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong.

Bullies drive witnesses and bystanders out of their jobs, just as they do to "firsthand" victims. Research

the impulse to "get even" can provoke a vicious circle of attack and counterattack—where each side views the other as evil and won't accept responsibility for fueling the conflict, and

Knowing when to detach yourself from an unhealthy situation can be healthy, but the kind of detachment that is negative is called "premature closure." This occurs when you detach yourself from a situation at the first sign of trouble. You leave even before you see whether or not the problem can be worked out. When this happens you never learn conflict resolution, you only learn how to leave.