Albert Einstein:

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Ann Landers:

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest--never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership.

Ann Landers Says Truth Is Stranger..., 1968

Bertrand Russell:

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

Education and the Social Order

Christopher Morley:

There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.

Colette:

My dear sir, they don't debate. Each of them merely issues an ultimatum, and in what a tone! It all goes to show what extraordinary people they are, each more unequivocal than the other. - "The Old Lady and the Bear"

Danny DeVito:

There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?

The War of the Roses

Dante Aleghieri:

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.

David Friedman:

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

David Hume:

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Dorothy Thompson:

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.

Elizabeth Drew:

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. (paraphrasing Voltaire)

Hamilton Mabie:

Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against; not with; the wind.

Heinz Pagels:

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.

The Dreams of Reason, 1988

Herbert Butterfield:

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness -- each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked -- each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

Indira Gandhi:

You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.

John Dewey:

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.

Jonathan Kozol:

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

On Being a Teacher, 1981

M. Scott Peck:

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

Marian Wright Edelman:

[W]e are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another.

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach:

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.

Mary Parker Follett:

There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.

Meldrick Lewis:

If you ain't never pick up the sword, you ain't never have to worry about fallin' on it.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Non-cooperation is a measure of discipline and sacrifice, and it demands respect for the opposite views.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Robert Frost:

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Saul Alinsky:

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

Sharon Welch:

Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Theodore Adorno:

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Thomas Paine:

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Walter Lippmann:

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

William Ellery Channing:

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.