Quotes About Conflict

One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire.

Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war.

Eisner, together with the historian Randolph Roth, notes that crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.33

Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?

The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator.

Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?

Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it. (Eventually the rules were rewritten so that players were "liberating" rather than conquering their opponents' territories.)

In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all.

reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people.9 Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

King immediately appreciated that Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance was not a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teachings of Jesus. Instead it was a set of hardheaded tactics to prevail over an adversary by outwitting him rather than trying to annihilate him.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, "If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.")

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them.

Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. Ordinarily

Though terrorists hope for the best, their small-scale violence almost never gets them what they want.

If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread

These conflicts usually occur in failed states, almost by definition. A war that doesn't even bother to invite the government represents the ultimate failure of the state's monopoly on violence.

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention. —Henry Maine

to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.

homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide.

The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, "War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

In fact, as of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.

Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present.