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Quotes About Conflict

The very Orthodox Professor Harold Fisch, bearded and wearing a skullcap, tells me that "the liberated territories" must be colonized and reclaimed by the Jews. The West Bank is Promised Land. For that matter the East Bank is, too. Professor Fisch, English by birth and dean of something or other at the new university in Beersheba, has no patience with the objections I offer. He tells me fiercely in his Oxbridge voice that we American Jews are not Jews at all.
~ Saul Bellow
You shop in supermarkets, you say good morning to friends on the telephone, you hear symphony orchestras on the radio. But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. A new explosion outside a coffee shop on the Jaffa Road: six young people killed and thirty-eight more wounded. Pained, you put down your civilized drink.
~ Saul Bellow
It is so easy for outsiders to say that there are two sides to the question. What a terrible expression! I am beginning to detest
~ Saul Bellow
And it is not hard to guess what he, the descendant of serfs, risen to a position of such might, must have experienced. Confronting the leaders of the bourgeois West, so long feared and hated, he saw himself to be tougher, deeper, and more intelligent than any of them.
~ Saul Bellow
Between Sartre and any given problem in politics there has always stood the United States. There are in the world two superpowers, but only one has seemed to him positively evil. When he discussed the Middle East, his first concern as a friend of Israel was to dissociate Israel from American interests.
~ Saul Bellow
President Gamal Abdel Nasser was aware when he closed the Gulf of Aqaba and drove out the U.N. peacekeeping force that Israel had no choice but to fight. Nasser not only threatened the very existence of Israel but defied the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, which had pledged themselves to keep Aqaba open.
~ Saul Bellow
Sartre says, "Those who claim that the Arabs started the war, that they are criminals, forget to consider the situation of the Palestinians, the absolutely insufferable situation of the Palestinians. They also forget that the Arabs from the beginning have been led by British maneuvers to take a negative attitude toward Israel, an attitude which has persisted since 1948, when an idiotic war was provoked.
~ Saul Bellow
But this might have been construed to mean that what the Nazis had done to the Jews resembled what Zionism had done to the Arabs—a parallel no sane person would agree to.
~ Saul Bellow
These words put an end to the peaceful morning. At the north there swells up the Russian menace. With arms from Russia and Europe, the PLO and other Arab militants and the right-wing Christians are now destroying Lebanon. The Syrians have involved themselves; in the eyes of the Syrians, Israel is Syrian land.
~ Saul Bellow
What he does argue is that Israel has for many years demanded that the Arab world recognize a legitimate Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael, but Israel did not, after the Six Day War, declare that it recognized the rights of a Palestinian entity.
~ Saul Bellow
Now settlers go into "liberated territories" like colonialists, with army support, and take land from the "natives.
~ Saul Bellow
Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.
~ Saul D. Alinsky
The life of man upon earth is a warfare … — JOB 7:1
~ Saul D. Alinsky
In most groups the craziest person is in control. It starts because no one wants the problems that come from pissing off a crazy person. It's just smarter and easier sometimes to let the crazy person have his or her way. Crazy
~ Scott Adams
Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair.
~ Scott Anderson
And for all concerned there was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of "free trade," the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled.
~ Scott Anderson
It wasn't just the British foreign secretary whose time was taken up dealing with such things, but the foreign ministers—and in many cases, the prime ministers and presidents and kings—of all the powers, and often over struggles even less significant than that which entangled Curt Prüfer. Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?
~ Scott Anderson
Moving into our small American housing enclave above the city were the families of American officers stationed in Saigon, and the free-ranging game of Cowboys and Indians that we boys in the neighborhood had previously played was renamed Green Berets and Viet Cong. It didn't actually change the game that much, except that in the past the Indians sometimes won, and in the new version the Viet Cong never did.
~ Scott Anderson
I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue.
~ Scott F. Fitzgerald
Diotrephes and Demetrius 9 I have written something to the Church; but Diot'rephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge my authority. 10So if I come, I will bring up what he is doing, accusing me falsely with evil words. And not content with that, he refuses himself to welcome the brethren, and also stops those who want to welcome them and puts them out of the Church. 11 Beloved, do not
~ Scott Hahn
Defenestration," I said. "'The act of throwing someone through a window.
~ Scott Heim
Honor's face turned bright red. Her knuckles went white. "Yes," Honor said. "I understand, Mister Gibbons." Gibbons nodded, making the common mistake of thinking that understanding and agreeing were the same thing.
~ Scott Meyer
That would be just dandy. All we'd have to do is sit back and wait for them to wipe each other out. But that doesn't explain the message written in blood. That's the mark of a seriously deranged mind. An intelligent mind, but one without a conscience.
~ Scott Nicholson
Let me get this stright, Aya-Chan. You want me, a person who can't lie, to lie about the fact that I can't lie? -Frizz mizuno
~ Scott Westerfeld