Quotes about Perpetual Conflict

John Adams

We not ought to fight them at all, unless we are determined to fight them forever.

In 1786 the Barbary Pirates demanded bribes so as not to seize American ships. England and France customarily paid the bribes. Thomas Jefferson proposed to build a navy and attack the pirates. However, there was no American navy at the time, Adams counseled a different course and in January of 1787 they signed a “pact” with Morocco whereby America paid for protection.

Andrew J. Bacevich

U. S. forces [are] more or less permanently engaged in ongoing hostilities. In one theater after another, fighting erupts, ebbs, flows, and eventually meanders toward some ambiguous conclusion, only to erupt anew or be eclipsed by a new round of fighting elsewhere. Nothing really ends.

Some others at the time did not see the different theaters of fighting as separate, but observed one commonality of almost all the violent conflict in the world—–Islamic, fundamentalist, extremism. Hence they viewed it as a world war with a singular enemy. Wars rarely ended at the time because most world opinion was against the Draconian degree of destruction and suffering for a people to be so broken that they will not consider fighting again. Cease fires allow the partied to regroup and ready themselves to continue their struggle.

Bernie Sanders

I do not want to see perpetual warfare in the Middle East.

Shimon Peres

If we do not have two states [Arab and Jewish], we shall have one conflict. Neither them [the Arabs] or us should condemn our children to fighting forever.

George Orwell

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

Robert Scheer

If the war on terror is endless, you could forget about democracy.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past.

Edgar Quinet

The ceding of Alsace-Lorraine is nothing but war in perpetuity under the mask of peace.

Kameron Hurley

I started writing 'God's War' knowing that I wanted to write about real people on a resource-strapped planet at perpetual war.

Eskinder Nega

All the great crimes of history, lest we forget, have their genesis in the moral wilderness of their times.

Primo Levi

It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.

Henry Adams

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

George Whitefield

All I can say is I look for perpetual conflicts and struggles in this life, and I hope for no other peace, only a cross, while on this side of eternity.

Masha Gessen

To effectively create the image of an enemy you have to show first of all that the enemy is extremely dangerous, but on the other hand less than human.

Perpetual Conflict Quotes