Conflict Cycle Quotes

What is gained by violence must be lost before superior violence.

I'm still an Irish republican; I absolutely believe in Irish unity and am working to achieve that. But over the course of 15 years or more, people like myself and others have been working to end the vicious cycle of conflict.

Historically, aggression unanswered has led to more aggression.

In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.

Donald Trump is right. We need to figure out a way to end this cycle of hostility that's putting this country at risk, costing us billions of dollars in defense, and creating hostility that should not exist.

Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they adduce. But, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a preventive war. Although this suggestion is repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war.

Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.

For instance, we're always fighting amongst each other. Who gives us the arms? And then we become indebted to wherever we are buying them from - with what? The very resources we need to keep there.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

Each time a foe is defeated in one corner of the world, another appears elsewhere.

I do occasionally wonder, if you were to bring to life one of those young men who sacrificed themselves in what was advertised to them as the Great War, and the war to end all war, and show them that we're still engaged in armed conflict in the same area, I'm not sure that they would be pleased about what their sacrifices amounted to.

When we attach ourselves to national identities, then we enter into a cycle of conflict. I didn't choose where I was born or who to be or what people would call me.

I cry really easily. If I see a butterfly, I'll practically burst into tears. So it's really hard for me to yell at people, because I'll feel so guilty about it. But if I don't, then they don't take me seriously and it's this endless cycle.

The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.

What is it in our society that encourages us to periodically to turn on each other? What is it in our society that leads us to the cycle of violence.

Violence is bound sooner or later to exhaust itself but peace cannot issue out of such exhaustion.

Every war carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.

It is not armaments that cause war, but war that causes armaments.

Mistrust and conflict form a self-reinforcing cycle in which the mistrust causes conflict that reinforces the mistrust