Conflict Quotes

“Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“If he touches me, I will succumb. I know the power he wields over me and my traitorous body. I know.”
― E.L. James

“In our evolution language has been the greatest single contribution to our understanding and misunderstanding”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“A mistake made by many people with great convictions is that they will let nothing stand in the way of their views, not even kindness.”
― Bryant McGill

“I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.”
― Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre

“Your future is uncertain, and I can tell you nothing that can help you. You are singular and dangerous, and so it is that you are sought by both the Dark and the Light.”
― Alison Croggon, The Naming

“Humans do not simply, innocently, and honestly disagree with each other about the good, the just, the right, the principles and applications of moral distinction and valuation, for they are already caught, like it or not, in a complex dynamic of each other’s desires, recognition, power, and comparisons which not only relativizes moral distinctions and valuations, but makes them a constant and dangerous source of discord.”
― Gregory B. Sadler

“I could simply
kill you now,
get it over with,
who would
know the difference?
I could easily
kick you in, stove you
under, for all those times,
mean on gin,
you rammed words
into my belly. (p. 52)”
― Barbara Blatner

“oh.
she heard it
too-no waters
coursing, canyon
empty, sun
soundless-
and the beast
your life
nowhere
hiding (p. 103)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

“Argument need not be heated; it can be punctuated with courteous smiles - or sympathetic tears.”
― J. Sidlow Baxter, Awake, My Heart: Daily Devotional Studies for the Year

“...gripping the
rim of the sink
you claw your
way to stand
and cling there,
quaking with
will, on
heron legs,
and still the hot
muck pours
out of you. (p. 27)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

“this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one’s perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat”
― Gregory B. Sadler

“blue-gold sky, fresh cloud,
emerald-black mountain, trees
on rocky ledges,

on the summit, the tiny pin
of a telephone tower-all

brilliantly clear,
in shadow and out.

and on and through
everything
everywhere
the sun shines
without reservation (p. 97)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

“There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth.”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World