Quotes About Conflict

I want sex. What do you want?" He cursed under his breath. "We are coming at this from a different place." "As long as we're coming, it doesn't matter.

In my view, the recognition that a person has distorted thinking that comes from or produces suffering is important, but it has no inherent implication for action. It doesn't imply medication, incarceration, or any particular brand of treatment. It just means stating openly that an internal conflict is not being resolved, is instead being expressed externally, and that those who did not cause the pain will be the ones to be blamed and to pay for it.

I have come to understand that the same action of unjustified escalation most often comes from one of two positions: Supremacy, or Trauma. And in realizing this, I am surprised by the similar behaviors expressed by these two divergent experiences.

Resolution doesn't mean that everyone is happy, but it does mean that perhaps fewer people are being blamed for pain they have not caused, or being cast as the receptacle of other people's anxieties, so that fewer people are dehumanized by false accusation.

Annihilation is a bad strategy, it gives the other nothing to lose.

Perhaps because Supremacy in some produces Trauma in others, they can become mirror images.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state. In both cases, the lack of recognition that the past is not the present leads to the newly acquired power to punish rather than to the self-transformation necessary to resolve conflict and produce justice.

When we are in the realm of Conflict, we can move from the Abuse-based construction of perpetrator and victim to the more accurate recognition of the parties as the conflicted, each with legitimate concerns and legitimate rights that must be considered in order to produce just resolution.

There is no evidence that time heals all wounds, or even most wounds; instead, it freezes unnecessary enmity and makes it harder to overcome. (...) As Bertolt Brecht said, "As crimes pile up, they become invisible." And so I don't believe in an ideology of non-response.

I am interested, in this book, in examining the phenomenon of overstating harm where it begins in its earlier stage as Conflict, before it escalates and explodes into tragedy.

Without in any way minimizing the role of violence in our lives, I am looking, simultaneously, at how a heightened rhetoric of threat that confuses doing nothing, normative conflict, and resistance with actual abuse, has produced a wide practice of over- stating harm.

Trying to create communication is almost always the uphill struggle of the falsely blamed.

Escalation is the key consequence of refusing to problem-solve or negotiate, and it demands our attention as a central obstacle to peace and justice.

Nothing is ever resolved," Rita said, tired. "That's one of those fake concepts. How can you resolve with a man dead at thirty-four? What kind of peace can you make with that? Lately I've been thinking that the conflict is for the best. Because then we are not pretending that anything about this can ever be reasonable.

She was lost. Torn between what to do. I saw it clearly in her eyes as she stared at me. I wanted to tell her to let go and be with me even if it was just one night but I couldn't. One night wasn't enough.

Analyse's head thrashed left and right as he continued his onslaught. Her body scraped against the harsh surface of the tree, tearing a painful howl from her lips yet she wanted more.

Placing her palm against the nearby spruce covered in fluffy white snow, Denyse bowed her head knowing the decision being made was one she didn't want to make. She needed Joseph, and so far, he's proved that he'll be there to make sure no one else got hurt.

Kris was in black running shorts and a tight gray T-shirt constructed from some sort of magical material that clung to his muscles and triggered a gush of epinephrine while her amygdala attempted to reconcile two conflicting signals from her prefrontal cortex: attraction and revenge. "All

Their hatred is so passionate that I can't help but wonder if they're attracted to each other.

Their hatred is so passionate that I can't help but wonder if they're attracted to each other." S

When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

They settled back into an embrace - as if it was nothing, as if it was easy; as if they weren't two boys, in a prison, in a city being blown and shot to bits; as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

And, worst of all, she was trapped with their marriage, their mystifying union, which had evidently passed out of whatever affectionate phase it had recently enjoyed and was already mired in some new quarrel . . . She didn't care about the details.