Quotes About Conflict

Montagues and Capulets, French and English, Whig and Tory, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Serb and Muslim, Christian and Saracen – we are irredeemably tribal creatures. The neighbouring or rival group, however defined, is automatically an enemy. Argentinians and Chileans hate each other because there is nobody else nearby to hate.

homini lupus', said Plautus. 'Man is a wolf to man.

The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy.

God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.

Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does

men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven times more often – than women have killed women.

The phenomena we refer to as intelligence may be a byproduct of intergenomic conflict between genes mediating offense and defense in the context of language', write Rice and Holland.

The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

One survey shows that throughout the world and throughout history, from thirteenth-century England to modern Canada, from Kenya to Mexico, men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven

Globalization is part of modern reality. How you define it is where the conflict is. Some of us think that it's civilized to provide people with water by putting up public drinking fountains. Other people think that drinking fountains need to be eliminated so as not to undercut the market for $2.00 bottled water. (from an interview in Attitude, 2002)

a language, he said, is a dialect with an army and a navy.

As if men did not die fast enough, they are ingenious at finding out ways to destroy one another.

The problem is that without an understanding for their meaning and purpose, most relationships quickly become little more than vehicles for the pursuit of selfish and individual goals. Disagreements then become a battle between conflicting interests, rather than a search for a mutually satisfying resolution.

I'm leaning on an old guy trick here, claiming my wife is being a typical irrational woman right as she begins saying things that I don't want to hear.

I want to touch her, but I can't, because I'm angry at her and she's angry with me, and even though I love her, I don't like her as much as I should.

These tears were difficult: they didn't want to come out and they didn't want to stay in.

Longfellow smiled. A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, my dear Lowell, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.

Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on...

In younger years, he'd wonder whether he was more doctor or writer. Since the dark period back home, he questioned if he was really either—witnessing death all around him had robbed him of both.

You don't like people?" Raf asked. "I don't like what people do to each other.

The parallel is inescapable: General Scott is Cortés, and General Santa Anna is Montezuma; the two acts of surrender in Mexico City echo, illuminate, and legitimize each other, representing resonant moments in the march of progress that is "American" history.

From Africa to the western United States to the story of the rainforest of the Amazon, it is the fate of many wild creatures either to be unwanted by men or wanted too much, despised as a means to progress or desired as a means to progress - beloved and brutalized all at once, like the elephant and whale and dolphin.

If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

The Core truth of Jerusalem today, it seems to me, is a jagged dislocation between appearance and reality. Whatever you see here is not really what's going on.