Quotes About Conflict

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, Ikick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Doyou hear? I refuse to choose.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

the old are destroying the young by them to die in distant fields, and in response the young are destroying themselves.

Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths

The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.

There is a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another, thing-darkness in our eyes and real weapons in our hands, neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour, thing-driven cousin against cousin, brother-thing against brother-thing, thing-child against thing-child.

O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of...

Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.

Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)

Literature is disputed territory.

I don't want to take the women into the city until I know how things stand.' ' I'll tell you precisely how they stand,' Nicolo bitterly replied. 'The absolute ruler of this city is a Medici. The Pope is a Medici. People round here say that probably God is a Medici and as for the Devil, he's definitely one, beyond any doubt.

The system is corrupt, a young man on a bicycle shouted, and if it cannot be changed it must be destroyed. The mastodon revolution is here and you must all choose which side of history you want to be on.

I don't want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world--the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle--but on many days every week that's how it feels.

Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.

On December 15th, 1971, Tiger Niazi surrendered to Sam Manekshaw;

You can get the boys out of the war, but you can't get the war out of the boys.

Don't ask who planted the bomb; in those days there were many such planters, many gardeners of violence.

An eighteen-year age gap had turned out to be a good place to dump most of the problems that can sometimes crop up between brothers

their true characters were shown not in the war they fought but in the peace they made.

The machine of state bearing down upon its enemies.

If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And she doesn't believe your God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him is implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us cannot end in truce. And what a truce! Yours is a patronizing, condescending lord. Al-Lat hasn't the slightest wish to be Allah's daughter. She is his equal, as I am yours.