Quotes About Conflict

Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that "peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight"—a sideways shot at Wilson's manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached "peace without victory," and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War.

Hundreds of thousands of men from both sides were drawn into a battle of attrition on a scale so immense that neither Germany nor France (nor even its ally Great Britain) could ever look on the war, or even the nature of war itself, the same way again.

now with his peace offer on the table, it would be even more imperative that the United States not choose sides, in order to preserve its moral leadership over the planet.

Fifty-five thousand casualties for five hundred yards' gain on the Champagne front in February 1915; 60,000 lost again that spring at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel; 120,000 in May at Arras. The next year brought the slaughter at Verdun stretching from February to June, with 315,000 total French casualties. Then came the French support for the British offensive along the Somme from July to November, in which another 200,000 were killed or wounded—all for little significant gain.

Once lead this people into war," Wilson ruminated, "and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance . . .

The result was a double disaster. The Chinese delegates refused to sign the final treaty, and left Paris in high dudgeon. When the news reached China, anti-Western and anti-Japanese riots exploded across the country. On May 4, some five thousand Chinese students stormed into Tiananmen Square in Peking to protest the Treaty of Versailles.

The roots of a future war were planted that fateful spring; Wilson's failure to support Japan's highest aspirations would end with bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor.

The problem was, Albert never made that lack of conflict explicit. For all his staggering erudition, he was never tempted to join up the two great existing systems of wisdom in the Western world: the school of Aristotle and Greek science and that of Plato and his Christian disciples, including Saint Augustine. That was the task Aquinas decided to undertake once he received his license to teach at the University of Paris in 1256.

the purpose of all these rules and regulations was to end what Plato saw as the worst aspect of normal Greek politics: the bitter class conflict and clashes among competing factions. In the average Greek city, rich and poor were literally out for each other's blood

Wilson focused his energies and hopes on his role as possible mediator.

If business profits rose during the war, labor's wages rose much more—an average of 70 percent.

That night, on May 26, 1328, Ockham, Cesena, and another Franciscan companion slipped out of their rooms, mounted horses, and lit out of Avignon for the border. The trio did not stop until they crossed into Bavaria, where the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig IV was engaged in his own dispute with the pope. They met in Munich, where according to legend William of Ockham said to the emperor, "Defend me with your sword, and I will defend you with my pen." Ludwig accepted the

That cannot be said of William of Ockham. Born a few years before Bacon's death in 1294, he carried the Aristotelian legacy of the Oxford Franciscans into direct conflict with the Church's most powerful figure, the pope himself.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

The coming of the Crusades had made them rich as well as independent

By the time of the Great Schism, Italy had descended back into gangster politics, as in the days of Caesar and Pompey.

German U-boats were poised to impose a blockade of the British Isles that threatened that island nation with starvation as well as defeat.

But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War's very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war, there can be no substitute for victory.

The other pacifists sprang forward to continue pummeling the stunned senator

Duels, murder, and feuding were constants in the Highlands, as was "scorning," or taking food and shelter by force from tenants of other clans when a feud was under way.

The strain of making war would be nothing compared with the strain of making peace.

Politics in modern society, then, must involve a tension between two conflicting, but complementary principles: liberty, which preserves individuals, and authority, which preserves society.

Would Erasmus now step forward and endorse Luther as one of his own? Would he acknowledge that they were fighting on the same side and lend the tremendous weight of his reputation to the Lutheran cause?

Before 1942 was out, the United States was producing more war materiel than all three Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—combined.