Quotes About Conflict

Perceive conflict as positive, creative, and issue driven. Don't allow personal attacks.

How little common sense this man (Clay) displays…Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!... Silence would have been to him wisdom.

If I have played the Judas, who has been my Christ that I have played the Judas with? Was it Thad Stevens? Was it Wendell Phillips? Was it Charles Sumner? These are the men that stop and compare themselves with the Savior; and everybody that differs with them in opinion, and to try to stay and arrest their diabolical and nefarious policy, is to be denounced as a Judas.

There may come a time when even the most peaceful man alive has to fight or else something truly evil will happen

And the truth is, there may come a time when even the most peaceful man alive has to fight or else something truly evil will happen.

They are weary of war, but war is what we live for. They are afraid of death, but death is what we love.

Science strides ahead; politics stumbles around like a drunk. We saw it in the age of discovery and the age of empire, but it was particularly glaring in the twentieth century – and, I would add (so far), the twenty-first too.

We probably wiped out other human types, we certainly wiped out other mammals; and throughout our history we have, in the intervals between making art and love, tried very hard to wipe out each other. We began, and we remain, agents of instability.

Nothing, sad to say, has advanced technical progress faster than war.

No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.

What I want and what's possible aren't necessarily compatible.

I just want her to be happy. But I don't think that's what she wants.

Did you ever have the problem where you don't want to go where you're supposed to be, but you can't go where you want to be?

And yet I quickly might arrive Where my extended soul is fixt, But Fate does iron wedges drive, And always crowds itself betwixt.

Cardiff thinks I'm tied up with them? I've half a mind to tell him to go fuck himself right now. Fortunately, the rational side of my brain keeps me from going all McPherson on him. I take a slow breath and put the regulator back in my mouth as I slip under the waves

The real danger is that the good guys will blindly keep doing bad things that they don't see as bad. It's why people who would give the shirt off their back to help the poor and the hungry will then march against genetically modified food, even if such food products could save millions of children from blindness or starvation. It's when people who want democracy in the Middle East find themselves building military bases instead of schools and hospitals.

Fun fact: the first manmade object in space was a Nazi V2 rocket in 1942. Space historians and people who like to remind you how there would be no private space industry without NASA tend to gloss over how much those goose-stepping assholes contributed to rocket technology.

Killing is a solution to a problem. Murder is something you do because you want to.

I've learned that you never win a battle of wills with a crazy person because they don't even know there's a battle.

We just used grenades and MP7s," says Hughes. "That doesn't exactly sound humane," replies Kell. "Those crocodiles were all members of ISIS. My commander told me so.

When things get bad, the trouble comes to the surface.

Reports had long held that Bykov had backed Lebed with funds, hoping for a cozy relationship. But the enmity, the aide said, had run deep from the start. When Lebed arrived in town to assume the governorship, Bykov had come calling. The two had locked themselves in the governor's office, told everyone to go home, taken off their suit coats, and brawled. "They beat the hell out of each other," the aide said. "And the fight continues to this day.

As often happens in large families, the Morgenthau siblings divided along age lines. They paired up in alliances, squared off in rivalries.

It wasn't just 'divide and conquer,'" said Kazikhanov. "It was 'divide, conquer, and tie up in trouble.