I suppose the most important thing I have done in my field is that I have talked longer and harder and more persistently and enthusiastically about p… - Elmer Eric Schattschneider

In the competition of conflicts there is nothing sacred about our preference for big or little conflicts. All depends on what we want most. The outcome is not determined merely by what people want but by their priorities.

The substitution of conflicts is the most devastating kind of political strategy. Alliances are formed and re-formed; fortresses, positions, alignments and combinations are destroyed or abandoned in a tremendous shuffle of forces redeployed to defend new positions or to take new strong points. In politics the most catastrophic force in the world is the power of irrelevance which transmutes one conflict into another and turns all existing alignments inside out.

The role of conflict in the political system depends, first, on the morale, self-confidence and security of the individuals and groups who must challenge the dominant groups in the community in order to raise an opposition.