Quotes About Conflict

It isn't precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire.

How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.

Why? Because the consequence of remaining silent is worse. Of course, it's easier in the moment to stay silent and avoid conflict. But in the long term, that's deadly. When you have something to say, silence is a lie—and tyranny feeds on lies. When should you push back against oppression, despite the danger? When you start nursing secret fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the wish to devour and destroy.

Violence, after all, is no mystery. It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. It's easy. It's peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.

The most intense hatreds and also sometimes the most intense love is within families.

Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel's back.

Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaningless, and that is no improvement at all.

No matter how good your intentions, or how sweet and tolerant your temperament, you will not maintain good relations with someone you fight

if you really want to get killed, the best thing to do is go drink with a family member

you must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace.216 You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view, or to listen and negotiate.

Nuestros duramente conseguidos métodos adaptativos luchan por dominar, a menudo de forma violenta, en un individuo dado, entre individuos dentro de sociedades, y entre sociedades. Por tanto, se suscita el problema de la organización.

Marx did the same thing when he described man in a fundamentally economic, class-based manner, and history as the eternal battleground of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Everything can be explained by running it through a Marxist algorithm.

Every society is already characterized by patterned behavior; otherwise it would be pure conflict and no "society" at all.

If you can bite, you generally don't have to. When skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary.

We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places: loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable

You don't get peace by being right. You just get to be right, while your partner gets to be wrong—defeated and wrong. Do that ten thousand times and your marriage will be over (or you will wish it was).

But just as often, people are bullied because they won't fight back. This happens not infrequently to people who are by temperament compassionate and self-sacrificing—particularly if they are also high in negative emotion, and make a lot of gratifying noises of suffering when someone sadistic confronts them (children who cry more easily, for example, are more frequently bullied).

Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel's back.

And this is only the beginning of the road to total familial warfare, conducted mostly in the underworld, underneath the false façade of normality and love.

The same pattern of creative conflict pervades the Old Testament, which is in large part a series of stories about the spirit in prophetic opposition to the inevitable corruption of dogma harnessed to serve power. It is the personality who mimics that model who might be regarded as truly Western, in the deepest of psychological senses.

Violence, after all, is no mystery. It's peace that's the mystery.

Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable.

Restraining orders work best, however, with the sort of person who would never require a restraining order.

What do you do to avoid conflict, necessary though it may be? What are you inclined to lie about, assuming that the truth might be intolerable? What do you fake?