Quotes About Conflict

The real action is in the enemy's reaction.

Ego must be so all-pervading that the personality of the organizer is contagious, that it converts the people from despair to defiance, creating a mass ego. CONFLICT

Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society.

The Ninth Rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

My mind now has a celebration party and a funeral going on in the same room.

Zealots: a Jewish movement in the first century AD that focused on the use of violence to restore the Land and establish the kingdom of God.

But their peace will never be greater than when they encounter evil people in peace and are willing to suffer from them."48

If you spend all your time arguing with people who are nuts, you'll be exhausted and the nuts will still be nuts.

You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

If you spend all your time arguing with people who are nuts, you'll be exhausted and the nuts will still be nuts.

But defeating one's enemies is only half the game; for a war to be truly justifiable one has to materially gain.

A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades--no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer.

there was just one person in the world who knew the full details of both the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the emerging Sykes-Picot compact, and who might have grasped the extent to which Arab, French, and British goals in the region had now been set on a collision course: Mark Sykes.

Taking responsibility for situations, regardless of who caused them, always helps to expedite resolving

Negotiation is useful not only in a crisis situation, but also in management. Good negotiators work from people's interests, not their positions.

Regarding clarity, most teams in the working world are starving for it. Layers of hierarchy create conflicting goals.

Ambiguity makes everyone tolerant of incompetence.

If you make it clear that you are dead serious and will fight to the end about a particular issue, you force more possibilities to arise.

For every awkward debate on a P2, there was often a private Skype chat where it was resolved. Matt set good examples for praising in public and critiquing in private.

Politics is a kind of problem solving. No matter what organizational challenge you face, and how frustrating it might be, it's just another kind of problem to solve.

Remember that culture changes the value of tools: for example, if you have a team of people who hate each other, they will make each other miserable no matter how many billions of dollars of communication technology they use. Alternatively if you have people who trust each other and have similar goals, they'll be effective with smoke signals and carrier pigeons. Wars have been won by tightly knit armies using candles and Morse code.

we're what you call heterogenous. That means we're everywhere, everybody at once. We're both good and bad, right and wrong. We're the great resolvers of conflict. We're like octopuses--because we'll swallow anything. Even men. Even battling and forlorn men like you and your dad. You guys try so hard to be subjects, characters, things, you forget us women are the whole story. We embrace you all. What you really want to destroy is women, that story of yourself you can't control.

War is the true Nature of the world, a dog with matted fur lapping eagerly at the bloody Nile, wagging its threadbare tail the entire time.