Quotes About Conflict

That tells us that the most damaging kinds of lethal violence (at least from 1820 to 1952) were murders and world wars; all the other kinds of quarrels killed far fewer people.

The realization is disconcerting because it suggests that in a given disagreement, the other guy might have a point, we may not be as pure as we think, the two sides will come to blows each convinced that it is in the right, and no one will think the better of it because everyone's self-deception is invisible to them. For

As Winston Churchill noted, "Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.

The observation that conflict is part of the human condition, banal though it is, contradicts fashionable beliefs.

This isn't the first time we've been warned of certain ruin. The experts have predicted civilization-ending aerial gas attacks, global thermonuclear war, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a Chinese razing of half of humanity, nuclear powers by the dozen, a revanchist Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a world war fought over diminishing oil, nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks.

Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one.

As religious issues came to dominate political ones, any negotiations with the enemies of one state looked more and more like heresy and treason. The questions which divided Catholics from Protestants had ceased to be negotiable. Consequently . . . diplomatic contacts diminished."98 It would not be the last time ideological fervor would act as an accelerant to a military conflagration.

It's highly unpleasant to be gassed, but then it's just as unpleasant to be perforated or shredded by pieces of metal.

Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is.

Genetic individuality gives us our different tastes and needs, and it also sets the stage for strife.

People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty.

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

Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups.

one can imagine a leader who has a changing willingness to suffer a cost over time, increasing as the conflict proceeds and his resolve toughens. His motto would be: "We fight on so that our boys shall not have died in vain." This mindset, known as loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

when the complexity of the leaders' speeches declined, war followed.

if religion were a source of morality, the number of religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero.

no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war.

La violencia se considera moral, no inmoral: por todo el mundo y a lo largo de toda la historia, se ha asesinado a más personas para imponer la justicia que para satisfacer la codicia.

Among affluent liberal democracies Ã¢â'¬Â¦ a true state of peace appears to have developed, based on genuine mutual confidence that war between them is practically eliminated even as an option. Nothing like this had ever existed in history.

Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals.

With a constant probability of ending every year, a war is most likely to end after its first year, slightly less likely to end within two years, a bit less likely to stretch on to three, and so on.

And so they opened the door to the idea that in the name of future peace, any and all means might be justified—including even exterminatory war."108 Kant himself despised this turn, noting that such a war "would allow perpetual peace only upon the graveyard of the whole human race." And the American framers, equally aware of the crooked timber of humanity, were positively phobic about the prospect of imperial or messianic leaders.

The impression that the Muslim world indulges kinds of violence that the West has outgrown is not a symptom of Islamophobia or Orientalism but is borne out by the numbers.

En las pequeñas empresas -o, como se las suele llamar, las *empresas familiares* o *empresas de papá y mamá*- el nepotismo es muy habitual, por lo que puede entrar en conflicto con los principios de igualdad de oportunidad y granjearse el rencor de la comunidad en que se encuentra.