Conflict Roots Quotes

When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.

The closed-door policy [to immigration] is one of the root causes of our wars.

the latent causes of faction [which causes men] to vex and oppress each other.

Many Israelis are educating their kids in a very nationalist, powerful identity, since kindergarten - and the Arabs as well.

Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.

The reason the Jews hate Nazis is primarily because they didn't come up with the idea first.

One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.

[The tension] between the Christians and Muslims goes back to the Crusades, doesn't it? It's too easy to blame everything on one guy. These are unpredictable, dangerous times, and I don't think that anyone really knows quite what to do.

Some Libertarians argue that Western occupation fans the flames of radical Islam; I agree. But I don't agree that, absent Western occupation, that radical Islam 'goes quietly into that good night.'

Every modern war has had its roots in exploitation.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not reallybecome aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict.

To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.

The root cause of all the problems we have in the world today is ignorance of course. But most, polarization.

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

Even modern wars are fought like revenge tales from some petty grievance.

Belief that your tribe is good and other tribes are evil is what everyone thought for most of human history.

I'll tell you something, Harpy," he said, his voice almost a whisper now. "It never even occurred to me that we wouldn't make it. And it never occurred to you that we would. You were just waiting for us to go down in flames. I thought we could get through anything.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart

The world’s gravest conflicts are not over ethical principles or disputed values but over disputed facts.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.

It is a platitude to say that the world is diverse, ... Nevertheless, despite this diversity starting us in the face, the human mentality has continually resisted understanding and accepting it. Our mentality shows an absolutist, standardizing tendency; it demands sameness and uniformity from everything, everywhere, that only our culture, our values should count. We deem them the only perfect and universal ones, without asking others what they think. And herein lies the world's great contradiction, the contradiction between its actual, objectively existing diversity and the stubborn desire of the human mind to substitute it with a vision of a unified, indisputably homogeneous world. How many conflicts—including the bloodiest ones—have had their roots in this irreconcilable contradiction!

What sets men at variance is but the treachery of language, for always they desire the same things.

War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.