Quotes about Hostility

is often a hostile act, often an exercise of power over somebody else.

Conflict is viewed as the active striving for one's own preferred outcome which, if attained, precludes the attainment by others of their own preferred outcome, thereby producing hostility.

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.

BATTLE, n. A method of untying with the teeth of a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

[Conflict can be defined] as the opposition of approximately equally strong field forces.

Essentally combat is an expression of hostile feelings. But in the large-scale combat that we call war hostile feelings often have become merely hostile intentions. At any rate, there are usually no hostile feelings between individuals. Yet such emotions can never be completely absent from war. Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves as a more or less substitute for the hatred between individuals. Even when there is no natural hatred and no animosity to start with, the fighting itself will stir up hostile feelings: violence committed on superior orders will stir up the desire for revenge and retaliation against the perpetrator rather than against the powers that ordered the action. It is only human (or animal, if you like), but it is a fact.

The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.

Acts of hostility shall be intended matters of force.

Conflict may be defined as a situation of competition in which the parties are aware of the incompatibility of potential future positions, and in which each party wishes to occupy a position that is incompatible with the wishes of the other.

Enemies are hostile, out to stop you, to eliminate you and your ideas; they are also to be loved, even as yourself.

A conflict is to be characterized psychologically as a situation in which oppositely directed, simultaneously acting forces of approximately equal strength work upon the individual.

Power controlled or abridged is almost always the rival and enemy of that power by which it is controlled or abridged.

Without a defined enemy, some people wouldn’t know how to get through the day. When there’s no enemy, they make one. An enemy does not occur naturally. Animals may have conflict but it is survival motivated. It is Homo sapiens who seek out others and hit them until they hit back. It is as old as the first line drawn in the sand. Isn’t it easier to fight than think?

Conflict can be viewed as repeated cycles of observing, orienting, deciding and acting by both sides, and also, I might add, at all levels. The adversary that can move through these cycles faster gains an inestimable advantage by disrupting his enemy's ability to respond effectively.

An enemy has to be defeated in battle, but an adversary’s different. You must outwit an adversary.