Quotes About Conflict

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions—religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit—bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.

The contrast between rapid, automatic moral intuitionism and conscious, deliberative moral reasoning plays out in another crucial realm and is the subject of Greene's superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so challenging.

There is often an inverse relationship between levels of intragroup and intergroup aggression. In other words, groups with highly hostile interactions with neighbors tend to have minimal internal conflict. Or, to spin this another way, groups with high levels of internal conflict are too distracted to focus hostility on the Others.

Culture leaves long-lasting residues—Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian the government was in 2000; over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today.

Greene calls "the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality" is shown by the fact that most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose "right" is righter.

religious wars, which are, to cite a quote generally attributed to Napoleon, "people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend

There's no hope for a family that quarrels all the time.

He felt himself, in a way, torn between two worlds: a solid, bourgeois world where ultimately everything was ordered and rational, as he was accustomed to from home, and an untrammelled one full of darkness, blood, and undreamt-of surprises.

On her way back she thought she noticed that everything in the world was secretly contrived for beatings. It was just a thought that went through her mind. Parents their child. The state its convicts. The military its soldiers. The rich the poor. The coachman his horse. People went walking with big dogs on leashes. Everyone would rather intimidate another person than come to an understanding with him.

there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't.

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning.

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning. ~ 'Coal Black Horse

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning. ~ 'Coal Black Horse

the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness combined to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife. . .

But it wasn't a Primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the backroom of Casey's Saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic Party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes, and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood.

We all knew the great lesson of history; I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.

At times we seem to move in parallel rather than in combination, then at odd moments collide.

He now knew that war was not at all like culling deer, and the last one, with the man so close, had been the worst. The shock on the enemy's face as the arrow halted his run would haunt him always. Robert Reid – White Light Red Fire

Over all the millennia, only you have ever loved me, Thor. Only you have ever looked at me with affection in place of condescension. Why, then, am I killing you, and not the others? Because you stopped.

Words unconsciously shift thoughts and feelings. One person's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter'; politicians jockey to commandeer 'family values,' and somehow you can't favor both 'choice' and 'life'.

I suspect that it's because their belief system has segmented their world into a moral in-group and out-group so decisively that they're unconflicted about what they're doing. To them, the people they're killing are scarcely human. I think you share my concern about bad ideas being the malware that can get even psychologically normal people, biologically normal people, to do the unthinkable. How do you view this, in the context of your research?

The weakest punches are thrown with the tongue.