Quotes About Conflict

What happened has hurt us. Now you have to work this out.

Almost 6,500 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed in one day at Antietam. This staggering number was four times the number that would be killed in the landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944. The total for this one day was more than the deaths in all of the other wars of the nineteenth century—the War of 1812, the Indian wars, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War—combined.

Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

Between a man and his mother-in-law, as between a woman and her father-in-law, unacknowledged sexual desire can easily open a wound which will go on festering with jealousy, resentment and hatred, but no woman has ever waged war against her son-in-law more relentlessly than she {Madame de Montreuil] did.

It is very doubtful that one can implement Jesus's command to love one's enemies and kill them at the same time.

war is inconsistent with the Christian religion, immoral in its acts, and repugnant to the true interests of mankind.

Before I die I have given myself the modest task of convincing the Christians in America that as Christians we have a problem with war. I am not expecting the vast majority of Christians to be pacifists or even just warriors. I simply want them to see that there is a profound tension between our worship of a crucified messiah and the support of war.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.

People don't start wars, governments do.

Qaddafi counted on America to be passive. He counted wrong.

Some say it will bring war to the heavens, but its purpose is to deter war, in the heavens and on earth.

The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas-a trial of spiritual resolve the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.

Es gibt etwas Wichtigeres als politische Freiheit, und politische Rechte sind ein Mittel, kein Selbstzweck. Ihr Zweck ist Sicherheit für Leben und Eigentum, und diese Sicherheit konnte durch die Verfassung im republikanischen Rom nicht garantiert werden. Das durch Bürgerkriege und Unruhen verbrauchte und gebrochene römische Volk war bereit, das zerstörerische Privileg der Freiheit aufzugeben und sich wie am Anfang der Zeiten einer strengen Regierung unterzuordnen.

War is our only recourse. There is no other remedy.

War exists notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it."8

We start out in these things from the same places, the fast and the slow. We pass along the same stages: excitement, enchantment, dispute, anger, reconciliation, love. And the end of love. We pass these same stages, unevenly paced, until at last, everything exhausted, we arrive at a place marked I just don't care anymore.

There is a difference between compromise and compromising. One allows for negotiation. The other undermines who you are.

You knew you couldn't reason with him. Not in the state he'd created for himself.

My dentist was married to a manicurist. But it did not work out. They fought tooth and nail !

That's weird. 'Cause many high-ranking staff members at the USDA were employed by, or are otherwise affiliated with, the meat and dairy industries.159 And if the group responsible for "the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products" is run by people from the same industries they're supposed to be protecting us from . . . well, that would be a conflict of interest. And it is.

If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war—and when everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission.

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)

It takes a whole government to really screw up a war. A dollop of American hubris goes a long way too.