Quotes About Conflict

Oh, easy," said Janine. "It was George Herman. That's it. I won!" "Cheater!" I cried. "You looked! You must have looked!" "I did not," Janine retorted. "I just knew it." "Nerd!" Janine slammed the board shut and walked off in a huff.

All week I kept the awful secret of my adoption to myself. I didn't even tell Stacey what I'd discovered, and Stacey is my best friend in the world. I wanted to talk to Stacey, but I couldn't. Not yet. There must, I thought, be some terrible reason for keeping my adoption a secret, but what could the terrible reason be?

Go away! Get out! Don't kill me! I've got a kitten at home. He needs me. Oh, yeah. I've also got a gun.

Janine shook her head. Then she stomped into the house. "Mean Janine," I muttered. "Come on, Jamie. Let's go." Janine had spoiled my whole afternoon.

I really love Courtie and I love Leigh too, I guess. After all, she'd been my stepmother for five years then ever since I was 11, and she'd seen my older brother, Mike and me through some hard times. But Leigh and I had always clashed, especially over Courtenay. See, Leigh didn't quite trust me. We got off on the right foot and never seemed to get on the right one, at least not for long.

If Kristy wanted me to feel left out for some reason, I could do the same to her.

The two-year-olds were standing over a pile of dirty forks and spoons, laughing hysterically. They're okay, Claudia said. No thanks to you, Mary Anne commented under her breath. If you're so concerned, why don't you teach Marnie and Ryan to play Parchessi? Claudia said, marching out of the room. They're already making a silverware sculpture! Mary Anne retorted. (Boy, was Mary Anne furious. She never talks like that).

Mary Anne took a deep breath, then she let Claudia have it, screamed at her, threw the easel to the floor and dumped plaster of paris on her head. Actually, that was what I would've done, but not Mary Anne.

Don't let her sit near me, Mary Anne whispered. Can't you guys just kiss and make up? I asked. Ask Claudia. She's the one who decided not to talk to me. Well, you weren't exactly Miss Congealiality yourself. Gene. Congeniality. Whatever.

Was her "conflict" invented? Was she making an excuse so she could see Jeremy without having to admit it to us?

When two people are having problems, it's hard to tell who has changed.

Something wasn't right in the Nicholls household, but what could I do about it? I hated to see two kids so unhappy, but if Mr. Nicholls had his rules, who was I to question them? It was his house. Joey and Nate were his sons.

How did people deal with a situation like this? Maybe they'd make Mr. Nicholls promise never to do it again. Maybe he'd have to go to counseling. In any case, I knew things would start to change for the better as soon as Mom and Mrs. Nicholls talked.

Anti-Semitism is intrinsic to both Christianity and Islam; both traditions consider the Jews to be bunglers of God's initial revelation.

Berman observes, for instance, that much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians.

Berman points out that this sort of thinking has led the Israelis to be frequently likened to the Nazis in the European press.

the bigots, whether they are of the Islamist variety or the anti-Muslim variety, essentially agree on a few matters. One is their belief that Islam itself—not Islamism—is a supremacist ideology that is here to take over the world; another is that, therefore, Muslims and non-Muslims can never live equally and peacefully together, but must separate into religiously defined entities.

And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.

The concessions we have made to religious faith - to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence - have rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of conflict in our world.

But faith is still the mother of hatred here, as it is wherever people define their moral identities in religious terms.

Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.

Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.

Taking oneself to be the thinker of one's thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.

In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.