Human Conflict Quotes

When you hate, you generate a reciprocal hate. When individuals hate each other, the harm is finite; but when great groups of nations hate each other, the harm may be infinite and absolute. Do not fall back upon the thought that those whom you hate deserve to be hated. I do not know whether anybody deserves to be hated, but I do know that hatred of those whom we believe to be evil is not what will redeem mankind.

Since 1914, we have endured world wars, genocides and government-sponsored famines, not to mention civil strife, riots and murders. Altogether, we have killed a staggering 100 million to 200 million of our own kind. But over the century, about 10 billion lives were lived — which means that just 1 to 2 percent of the world’s population died violently. Those lucky enough to be born in the 20th century were on average 10 times less likely to come to a grisly end than those born in the Stone Age.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

Wars raged everywhere as men found new, inventive ways to kill even more of their race. It was like a contest, the many tribes of mankind competing to see who could commit the worst atrocities.

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

Wars are not a choice we make for no reason.

War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

I'm fascinated by what people will do to each other. Actually, I'm sort of interested in the gory details of life.

Humans are the big thing that cause damage in life - in war or whatever - and if I can get away from that and into a wilderness situation, I'm OK. You can more or less live on your own merit.

Man has set man against man, Washed against unwashed.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.

The history of mankind is a history of war.

I have no idea how one stops one group, one race, from hating another. The hatred between human groups has never been cured, except by time.

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.

Population pressure is the ultimate cause of every war.

The world will never come together and say, 'We are one.'

One evades discussion of serious issues by the simple device of passing them off as value problems, whereas, to say the least, many of these conflicts arose out of man’s very agreement regarding values.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

The normal state of mankind is war and peace is an aberration.

There have been poverty, pestilence, and famine, which were due to man's inadequate mastery of nature. There have been wars, oppressions and tortures which have been due to men's hostility to their fellow men.

It's such a tragedy that man endures in killing his brother and his own kind, putting him in jail and insane asylums, letting him lay out in the street.

I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man.