Quotes About Conflict

In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

For a whole month they'd had to play Barbarian Stomp (See If You Can Change History!). One side had the cities and the riches and the other side had the hordes, and – usually but not always – the most viciousness. Either the barbarians stomped the cities or else they got stomped, but you had to start out with the historical disposition of energies and go on from there.

If my eyes could shoot out fatal rays like the ones in comic books I would incinerate her on the spot. She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive.

This is a pattern humankind has repeated many times over the course of its history. When there is a crisis, whether real or imagined, culprits—whether real or imagined—must be found and eliminated.

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland.

stringing up rival kings on trees, rejoicing in piles of heads – there was an element of childish glee in all of that.

He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which.

His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.

the Republic of Texas is nervous. They fought Gilead to a standstill, but they don't want to be invaded. They're avoiding provocations.

It's all about sex and territory, which are what will finish us off in the long run.

Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot.

The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when language fails.

He held a knife against her breast, As into his arms she pressed, sang the girl. I could just leave, thought Richard. But he didn't want to do that. Oh Willy Willy, don't you murder me, I'm not prepared for eternity. Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

Rome versus the Visigoths, Ancient Egypt versus the Hyksos, Aztecs versus the Spaniards.

Petchenegs versus Byzantium," said Jimmy, one memorable day.

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This

God isn't what they say," she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.

Strange, there's so much religion in the world, but only enough to make us fight over who is right, not enough to make us love one another

Every inch of land there is so contested," I observed, more to myself than to him. "How many lives have been lost fighting over Jerusalem? Yet it is not special in terms of architecture, or location, or works of art.

War is a sinkhole that sucks money and men into it and is never filled.

We know - intellectually - that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive.

Questions are the heart and soul of constructive conflict. They open up the exploration, bring in new information, and reframe debate. When

Thucydides said, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

As the Prussian Minister of War, General Erich von Falkenhayn, said on August 4 as the war became a general one: "Even if we will perish, it was nice."10