Quotes About Conflict

Political balance among the competing groups was unstable because the king had no permanent armed force at his command.

Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

To those who think them selves strong, force always seems the easiest solution.

These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry.

Party animosity was concealed under a veil of studied courtesy.

TO BE "THE SEWER OF CHRISTENDOM and drain all the discords out of it" was the primary function of the Crusades,

Inevitably, as hatred of monarchy was added to hatred of episcopacy, they were led to republicanism.

Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence

Smite a villein and he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you.

Within the army, field officers despised Staff officers as "having the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam," but both groups were as one in their distaste for interference by civilian ministers who were known as "the frocks." The civil arm in its turn referred to the military as "the boneheads.

His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw

Why do we invest all our skills and resources in a contest for armed superiority which can never be attained for long enough to make it worth having, rather than in an effort to find a modus vivendi with our antagonist—that is to say, a way of living, not dying?

Anything that protracted a campaign Clausewitz condemned. "Gradual reduction" of the enemy, or a war of attrition, he feared like the pit of hell.

England's traditional tolerance was outraged at last.

On August 27 Richard Harding Davis, star of the American correspondents who were then in Belgium, made his way to Louvain by troop train. He was kept locked in the railroad car by the Germans, but the fire had by then reached the Boulevard Tirlemont facing the railroad station and he could see "the steady straight columns of flames" rising from the rows of houses.

In the end Britain made rebels where there had been none.

the struggle that will decide the course of history for the next hundred years.

Ending a war is a difficult and delicate business. Even intelligent rulers, when they exist, often find themselves unable to terminate a war, should they want to. Each side must become convinced at the same time and with equal certainty that its war aim is either not achievable or not worth the cost or damage to the state.

the inadvertent by-product of the nobles' passionate pursuit of war.

We must put aside all commonplaces as to the responsibility of the aggressor.… Success alone justifies war.

Everything took on the color of blood.

slaughter. And yet, so great is Mrs. Tuchman's skill that the reader forgets what he knows. Surrounded by the thunder of guns, the thrust and parry of bayonet and saber, he becomes almost a participant. Will the exhausted Germans keep coming? Can the desperate French and British hold? Will Paris fall? Mrs. Tuchman's

Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others.

Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher