State Conflict Quotes

All States do not have the same interests, but are there any interests which cannot be infinitely better reconciled before than after a war?

War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions, when they have developed to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states, or political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and of classes.

The real difference of interests, lay not between large and small, but between the Northern and Southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed a line of discrimination.

War has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states

Some day, one state will take up arms against another

Almost certainly there will be vicious wars between the states.

I expected to find a contest between a government and a people: I found two nations (French and English) warring in the bosom of a single state: I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races.

I'm not sure that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know that we're at war.

How is it possible to have a civil war?

That is because the conflict with al Qaeda is not governed by the Geneva Conventions, which applies only to international conflicts between states that have signed them.

I was standing next to a famed geo-politician when the first news of the Argentine attack [on the Faulkland Islands] was received, and heard him muse incredulously: "An old-fashioned naval battle. A war between two civilized nations, perhaps with even a declaration of war, and later a peace conference. Wow." No hostages, no nukes, no ideologies, no religious fanaticism; just a fair-and-square war over national interests - hard to believe, in this day and age.

No state at war with another state should engage in hostilities of such a kind as to render mutual confidence impossible when peace will have been made.

When human rights are systematically abused, it raises the question whether it may be legitimate in some circumstances for the international community to intervene within individual states as well as in conflicts between states.

A state attacked by another which renews an old claim rarely yields it without a war: it prefers to defend its territory, as is always more honorable. But it may be advantageous to take the offensive, instead of awaiting the attack on the frontiers.

It is true that large parts of the world have not had to endure state-to-state wars for decades. The majority of the world's nations have also been spared the scourge of civil wars, although many have known violence from revolutionary insurrection.

War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.

War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders

But in Republics there is a stronger vitality, a fiercer hatred, a keener thirst for revenge. The memory of their former freedom will not let them rest; so that the safest course is either to destroy them, or to go and live in them.

Where would you like to live? In a state of conflict or a conflicted state?

You go back and look at things like Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, a lot of people dying in state-sponsored arm conflict

I cannot think of any circumstances in which a government can go to war without the support of parliament.

Advanced nation-states are now using cyber power for unrestricted economic warfare and national security-motivated espionage, as well as a force multiplier and signaling instrument in conflicts.

There is no bigger judgment for a president of the United States than how you take a nation to war.

Shall we open the door to what may become the foulest proscription: state against state?

… the war is now grown to such a height, that it must be treated as a foreign war, and that every expedient which would be used in the latter case should be applied in the former.