Quotes About Conflict

War erases progress, leaves no trace of improvement.

The 20th century is the probably most hideous ugly century of the history of the human race. More people were killed by war in the 20th century than ever in history.

Take Islam out of the equation, and there's a very good chance you'd still find the Middle East at loggerheads with the West.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

It didn't matter anyway...he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end.

I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

I could have waited years, now that I knew the end of the story. I was cold and wet and very happy. I could even look with charity towards the altar and the figure dangling there. She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast; he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn't move to plead his cause.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

I wondered whether she would consent to sleep with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew that when I had smoked four pipes I would no longer want her.

The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.

He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?

It is you who are old fashioned with your machine-guns and your gas and your talk of country.

I could have hated him for saying it: it was like a claim. If you really loved me, I thought, you'd behave like any other injured husband. You'd get angry and your anger would set me free.

Mr Rennit was angry because he had not been given time to set his scene, and he could so obviously not afford his anger. There was a kind of starved nobility in the self-sacrifice of his rage.

Time gives poetry to a battlefield

What was most evil in him needed her: it couldn't get along without goodness.

Heroism began where politics stopped.

Oh, go away,' I said. 'Go to your Third Force and York Harding and the Role of Democracy. Go away and play with plastics.' Later I had to admit that he had carried out my instructions to the letter.

The Communists …' He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.

Graham Greene

Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.