Quotes About Conflict

War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared contest between bounded societies, or states. If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries.

The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies.

Winning a war can be as destructive as losing one, for if boundaries lose their clarity, as they do in a decisive victory, the state loses its identity. Just as Alexander wept upon learning he had no more enemies to conquer, finite players come to rue their victories unless they see them quickly challenged by new danger. A war fought to end all wars, in the strategy of finite play, only breeds universal warfare.

Esto es una selva donde nos despedazamos todos: sólo sobreviven los más fuertes y los débiles se destruyen". -La Máquina Génesis.

February 5, 2003, before the conflict began, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN he had absolute proof that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were an immediate threat to world security. He declared: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence . . . .

The Air Force was repeatedly refused permission to bomb those targets that the Joint Chiefs of Staff deemed most strategic. U.S. troops were given a general order not to fire at the Vietcong until fired upon.

Yeah, but at least a guy will punch you in the face, you know what I mean? They do it and then it's over. But with girls, we slice you up piece by piece. It's like death by a thousand cuts.

Bigs jabbed a finger into my chest. Ping. It felt like an aluminum baseball bat. "I paid you," he said. "Now I want my Velma back." "Easy on the chest, will you, Bigs? I store my heart in there.

Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims.

The fact that there is so much immoral behavior is not evidence of the weakness of the moral senses. The problem of wrong action arises because of the conflict among the several moral senses that exist, because of the struggle between morality and self-interest, and because of the corrosive effect of those forces that blunt the moral senses. We must often choose between duty and sympathy or between fairness and loyalty.

The conflict in West Virginia seemed warlike because of the huge arsenals assembled by both sides, the number of mercenaries the mine operators employed, the guerrilla tactics the strikers adopted, the four deployments of National Guard troops the governor ordered, and the abiding hatreds the clash created. As a result, the first West Virginia mine war embodied all the evils of class warfare that frightened so many Americans during the Progressive Era.

We humans have always sought to increase our personal energy in the only manner we have known, by seeking to psychologically steal it from the others--an unconscious competition that underlies all human conflict in the world.

When each expects the other to live in his or her world, to always be there to join in his or her chosen activities, an ego battle inevitably develops.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

Barack Obama has had a love affair with drones. By 2012, the CIA had conducted six times more drone strikes in Pakistan during the three years of the Obama administration than the agency had conducted under the entire eight years of George W. Bush,

Before the war on terror, the U.S. military had a well-earned reputation for the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

Coughlin came to believe that the Department of Veterans Affairs had an inherent conflict of interest that hobbled its ability to conduct honest research. The VA was charged not only with conducting research on medical conditions afflicting veterans but also with paying the benefits to veterans who suffered from those conditions. Whenever VA researchers discovered a new health problem, the VA had to pay out more money. The VA thus had an incentive not to discover new illnesses among veterans.

Whiskey is for drinkin', water is for fightin'." She frowned. "Mark Twain," he said.

PROLOGUE MARCH 1162 THE ARCHBISHOP'S men fled into the shadows of the lower valley. Behind them, atop the winter pass, horses screamed, arrow-bit and cleaved. Men shouted, cried, and roared. The clash of steel rang as silvery as a chapel's bells. But it was not God's work being done here.

So we're damned if we do and damned if we don't." She shrugged. "That pretty much sums up quantum physics.

Guns, grendels, or nuclear bombs; take your pick.

When mankind pushes, natures sometimes pushes back

Folks never understand the folks they hate.