Harder The Conflict Quotes

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.

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

the harder the conflict, the greater the triumph.

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that 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.

The harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph.

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their county; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny like hell is not easily conquered yet we have this consolation with us, 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.

The American Crisis Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.

The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament: the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss. Most of our problems, in other words, are problems of boundaries and the opposites they create.

These are the times that try men's souls...yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives every thing value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods.

the harder the conflict,the more glorious the triumph

It doesn t require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed it won t be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in his wolf's breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as the man who sings: "If I could be a child once more!" He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering. There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem, unhappy Steppenwolf. You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.

I remind myself that while it’s okay to feel conflicted about a situation, depression is a luxury that I can’t afford. I cannot allow another person’s lack of success to start undermining my own.

The hidden clash of a silent conflict like this is far harder to bear than an open quarrel.

Things are going to get harder. The future will test your strength. So far, you’ve lived in a time of prosperity. You haven’t experienced massive devastation, but you probably will.

And we would yell and not speak for days and what the fuck is wrong with conflict sometimes? It makes your brain better!! It makes you fight harder, it makes you more convinced in what you believe and who you are!

Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn't seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier—would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian intifadah, another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.

parenting strategies and laws that make it harder for kids to play on their own pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from “figure out how to solve this conflict on your own” to “invoke force and/ or third parties whenever conflict arises.

A fully-realized and known world is also a boring world. Mystery, alongside conflict, is another of those vital vittles that feeds the reader and keeps them hooked. Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason, I say -- so leave lots of questions.

There is no evidence that time heals all wounds, or even most wounds; instead, it freezes unnecessary enmity and makes it harder to overcome. (...) As Bertolt Brecht said, "As crimes pile up, they become invisible." And so I don't believe in an ideology of non-response.

This is something my mom told me once,” she said, stretching the ribbon out between her hands and then tying a loose knot on one end. “Imagine this is your relationship with Daniel.” She handed me the ribbon and pointed at the knot. “This is where you are right now. Untie it.” I slipped the knot free. “Pretty easy, right?” she said. “There’s a small bump on the fabric, but you can smooth it down. If I’d pulled the knot really tight, it’d be harder to untie, and there’d be a big dent left behind.” I flattened the ribbon across my leg. “Meaning the more you drag out conflicts the harder they are to recover from, and the more damage they leave behind?” “Precisely.” “How’d you get to be so smart?

Since there are always two parties in a relationship, the need for space may vary, as each would come with their own set of beliefs about how to spend time together and how much togetherness is too much and how much exclusive time one can claim from their partner. The conflicts arise when one partner feels neglected or left out due to the other’s need for space. If a partner expresses their need for space, it might feel like rejection or abandonment to the other. The clingy partner becomes clingier and the partner who is trying to get some space resents it, tries harder to break away, or if that isn’t possible, lies about that late office meeting when they have actually been at the pub, having a drink with their friends.

It's harder, and less glorious, to realize that legitimate values sometimes conflict with one another, and they have to be balanced. This is not a talent that is exalted on talk radio or cable news shows. But the need to calibrate a proper balance among opposing principles is evident in every issue we face today, from abortion to heath-care reform to affirmative action.

Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. The public prefers a tidy finale. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. It generates tension. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. It feels good. We REALLY like it when things come together. What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction. In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. The completed problems are, well, complete, so we forget them and move on. They later called this the 'Zeigarnik effect,' and it has influenced the study of many things, from advertising campaigns to coping with the suicide of loved ones to dysphoric rumination of past conflicts.

All our wonderful sexual freedom is dependent on two very important conditions: freedom from sexism and freedom from rape. These changes must take place at both the individual and community levels. Prosecuting rape and child molestation is quite difficult, so our communities need to work for our own safety. We can seldom send offenders to jail, but we can uninvite them from our parties, and remove them from the other environments that we control, both online and in the physical world. (...) Much of this conflict is the consequence of our absurd cultural insistence that in sex, men should be the initiators and women the withholders. Thus, some people learn that they are supposed to be pushy and others that saying anything but no is, well, slutty. This pattern leads to “no” being heard as an invitation to push harder, with predictably disastrous results.

The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character. It is obvious that Hamlet, say, is more alive than the man in the street, being both more complicated and more integrated, and perhaps he is the only one really alive, for he is a walking abstraction. Therefore it is harder for the mind to create a character than for matter create a man; and if we are absolutely incapable of creating and giving birth to a new being, then we would do better to keep quiet.

This Steppenwolf of ours has always been aware of at least the Faustian two-fold nature within him. He has discovered that the one-fold of the body is not inhabited by a one-fold of the soul, and that at best he is only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony. He would like either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf's life. It may be presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. With them, too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being of manifold states and strivings. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers. No, back to nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair. Harry can never turn back again and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of manifold complexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in his wolf's breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as the man who sings: "If I could be a child once more!" He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering. There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem, unhappy Steppenwolf. You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune favored his quest. All births mean separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.

What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? What if we are prevented from catalyzing workable and vital cities because the practical steps needed to do so are in conflict with the practical steps demanded by erosion? There is a silver lining to everything. In that case we Americans will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia: What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable: The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles. It is not hard to understand that the producing and consuming of automobiles might properly seem the purpose of life to the General Motors management, or that it may seem so to other men and women deeply commtted economically or emotionally to this pursuit. If they so regard it, they should be commended rather than cricicized for this remarkable identification of philosophy with daily duty. It is harder to understand, however, why the production and consumption of automobiles should be the purpose of life for this country. Similarly, it is understandable that men who were young in the 1920's were captivated by the vision of the freeway Radiant City, with the specious promise that it would be appropriate to an automobile age. At least it was then a new idea; to men of the generation of New York's Robert Moses, for example, it was radical and exciting in the days when their minds were growing and their ideas forming. Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth. But it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers. It is disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who are being trained now for their carreers, should accept *on the grounds that they must be "modern" in their thinking,* conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkably, but also to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children.

For many of us, no achievement and no amount of selflessness permits the luxury of self-satisfaction. To be good is to KNOW that you’re never good enough. A woman’s work is never done. Tomorrow you’ll try harder. It seems the more we try to be competent, emotionally responsible, hard-working, and successful, the more we are rewarded with self-doubt, guilt, and greater conflict in our relationships. When we added the world of work to our work world at home, our reward was to have been a stronger sense of self. Yet what most of us experience in reality amounts to a sense of exhaustion and the nagging feeling that there must be “something wrong,” something else that we’re looking for, something more that we should do.

The conflict in Serbia inflamed Russia’s wounded pride over its deflated status since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new Russia lacked the ability to shape world events, which made the American-led actions even harder to swallow. Yeltsin berated President Clinton, insisting that an intervention was forbidden by international law, only to be ignored. Russia resented the fact that the United States and its expanding NATO alliance were acting as if they could impose their will on the new world order without regard to Russia’s interests. Even worse, the conflict in Kosovo had striking parallels to the one in Chechnya, and even Russians not prone to paranoia could imagine a NATO campaign on behalf of Chechnya’s independence movement.

Today, it is becoming possible for [the girl] to take her future in her hands, instead of putting it in those of the man. If she is absorbed by studies, sports, a professional training, or a social and political activity, she frees herself from the male obsession; she is less preoccupied by love and sexual conflicts. However, she has a harder time than the young man in accomplishing herself as an autonomous individual. . . . [N]either her family nor customs assist her attempts. Besides, even if she chooses independence, she still makes a place in her life for the man, for love. She will often be afraid of missing her destiny as a woman if she gives herself over entirely to any undertaking. She does not admit this feeling to herself: but it is there, it distorts all her best efforts, it sets up limits.

Paley’s book Boys and Girls is about the year she spent trying to get her pupils to behave in a more unisex way. And it is a chronicle of spectacular and amusing failure. None of Paley’s tricks or bribes or clever manipulations worked. For instance, she tried forcing the boys to play in the doll corner and the girls to play in the block corner. The boys proceeded to turn the doll corner into the cockpit of a starship, and the girls built a house out of blocks and resumed their domestic fantasies. Paley’s experiment culminated in her declaration of surrender to the deep structures of gender. She decided to let the girls be girls. She admits, with real self-reproach, that this wasn’t that hard for her: Paley always approved more of the girls’ relatively calm and prosocial play. It was harder to let the boys be boys, but she did. “Let the boys be robbers,” Paley concluded, “or tough guys in space. It is the natural, universal, and essential play of little boys.” I’ve been arguing that children’s pretend play is relentlessly focused on trouble. And it is. But as Melvin Konner demonstrates in his monumental book The Evolution of Childhood, there are reliable sex differences in how boys and girls play that have been found around the world. Dozens of studies across five decades and a multitude of cultures have found essentially what Paley found in her midwestern classroom: boys and girls spontaneously segregate themselves by sex; boys engage in much more rough-and-tumble play; fantasy play is more frequent in girls, more sophisticated, and more focused on pretend parenting; boys are generally more aggressive and less nurturing than girls, with the differences being present and measurable by the seventeenth month of life. The psychologists Dorothy and Jerome Singer sum up this research: “Most of the time we see clear-cut differences in the way children play. Generally, boys are more vigorous in their activities, choosing games of adventure, daring, and conflict, while girls tend to choose games that foster nurturance and affiliation.

Heaven's eucharistic irruption into earthly space and time prompted classical Lutheranism not to join the Reformed and Anabaptists in their campaign of iconoclasm which rendered Christian churches little different in external appearance from Islamic mosques. While conceding the adiaphorous quality of images representing various aspects of the Incarnate Life, as early as his conflict with Karlstadt the Reformer defended the appropriateness of the crucifix and sculptures of Mary with the Christ Child. Orthodox Lutheran architecture and church decor attested the confession of our Lord's presence among His own in the means of grace, forging a style which goes hand in hand with precious doctrinal substance. Increasing accommodation to the North American Puritan milieu over the past century has led to a loss of the genuinely Lutheran understanding of the altar as a monument to the atonement, which is Christ's throne in our midst. ... If our chancels' decoration (or stark lack thereof) bespeaks the absence of our Lord and His celestial companions, can we be surprised at waning faith in the real presence and at waxing conviction of the rightfulness of an open communion practice? A deliberate opting for Puritanism's aesthetic barrenness can only make the reclaiming of Lutheran substance an even harder struggle.

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end. Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam: How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the race of Time, Till time stands fix'd. But it will be a related comfort. In our world the material for an eschatology is more elusive, harder to handle. It may not be true, as the modern poet argues, that we must build it out of 'our loneliness and regret'; the past has left us stronger materials than these for our artifice of eternity. But the artifice of eternity exists only for the dying generations; and since they choose, alter the shape of time, and die, the eternal artifice must change. The golden bird will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes. In my next talk I shall be trying to explain some of the ways in which that song changes, and talking about the relationship between apocalypse and the changing fictions of men born and dead in the middest. It is a large subject, because the instrument of change is the human imagination. It changes not only the consoling plot, but the structure of time and the world. One of the most striking things about it was said by Stevens in one of his adages; and it is with this suggestive saying that I shall mark the transition from the first to the second part of my own pattern. 'The imagination,' said this student of changing fictions, 'the imagination is always at the end of an era.' Next time we shall try to see what this means in relation to our problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.

It had been hard enough to drive past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and the terrible air, and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, I was told. Was the smell of excrement only on the periphery, from the iridescent black lake? No; that stench went right through Dharavi. Even more astonishing was to read in a Bombay magazine an article about Papu's suburb of Sion, in which the slum of Dharavi was written about almost as a bohemian feature of the place, something that added spice to humdrum middle-class life. Bombay clearly innoculated its residents in some way. I had another glimpse of Dharavi some time later, when I was going in a taxi to the domestic airport at Santa Cruz. The taxi-driver - a Muslim from Hyderabad, full of self-respect, nervous about living in Bombay, fearful of sinking, planning to go back home soon, and in the meantime nervously particular about his car and his clothes - the taxi-driver showed the apartment blocks on one side of the airport road where hutment dwellers had been rehoused. In the other direction he showed the marsh on which Dharavi had grown and, away in the distance, the low black line of the famous slum. Seen from here, Dharavi looked artificial, unnecessary even in Bombay: allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a vote-bank, and hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there. And yet people lived there, subject to this extra exploitation, because in Bombay, once you had a place to stay, you could make money.

Such racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema among scientists and politicians alike. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’. There is no such word, but it’s about time we coined it. Among today’s elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’ Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism. Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between human cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?

There is a discrimination in this world and slavery and slaughter and starvation. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. "These are differing evils, but they are common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows. "But we can perhaps remember - even if only for a time - that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. "Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men. And surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again. "Our answer is to rely on youth - not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. They cannot be moved by those who cling to a present that is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger that come with even the most peaceful progress. It is a revolutionary world we live in; and this generation at home and around the world, has had thrust upon it a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived. "Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. "Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe.

How High Emotional Arousal Affects Your Relationship There are many ways that negative emotional arousal affects your relationship, both directly and indirectly. For example, it may lead you to overreact in some situations, and perhaps even to underreact in others. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for your partner to respond in understanding, soothing, or loving ways: he or she simply doesn’t have accurate information on which to base a response. So, even if your partner wants to respond in a loving way, and doesn’t have his or her own negative emotional arousal to deal with (which is unlikely), it makes the job harder.

once religion enters any conflict, it becomes harder to settle.

Human intellects make sense of things and, if anything, err on the side of coherence. Geniuses of my acquaintance, who almost seem clever enough to make sense of the world if they so wished, are more likely to accept it as a muddle than the common man who invests it with a transcendent character of its own or recognizes it as filled with divine purpose in which nothing is out of place. Pluralism and chaos are harder to grasp – harder, perhaps, to understand and certainly to accept – than monism and order. For a whole society to accept an agreed world-picture as senseless, random and intractable, people seem to need a lot of collective disillusionment, accumulated and transmitted over many generations (see here). Moral and cognitive ambiguities are luxuries we allow ourselves which most of our forebears eschewed. Whether from an historical angle of approach, along which reconstruction is attempted of the thought of the earliest sages we know about, or from an anthropological direction, lined with examples from primitive societies which survived long enough to be scrutinized, early world-pictures seem remarkably systematic, like the ‘dreamtime’ of Australian aboriginals, in which the inseparable tissue of all the universe was spun. The ambitions these images embody betray the inclusive and comprehensive minds which made them. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ethnographers’ fieldwork seemed ever to be stumbling on confusedly atomized world-pictures, shared by people who reached for understanding with frenzied clutchings but no overall grasp. This was because anthropologists of the time had a progressive model of human development in mind: animism preceded polytheism, which preceded monotheism; magic preceded religion, which preceded science. Confusion came first and categories, schemes and systems came later. People of the forest saw trees before they inferred wood. Coherence, it was assumed, is constructed late in human history. It now seems that the opposite is true. Coherence-seeking is one of those innate characteristics that make human thought human. No people known to modern anthropology is without it. ‘One of the deepest human desires’, Isaiah Berlin has said, ‘is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience is symmetrically ordered.’ Two kinds of coherence seem to come easily to primitive cosmogonists: they can be called, for convenience, binarism and monism. (For binarism, ‘dualism’ is a traditional name, but this word is now used with so many mutually incompatible meanings that it is less confusing to coin a new term.) Binarism envisages a cosmos regulated by the flow or balance between two conflicting or complementary principles. Monism imagines an indivisibly cohesive universe; the first a twofold, the second an unfolded cosmos. Equilibrium and cohesion are the characteristics of the world in what we take to be its oldest descriptions: equilibrium is the nature of a binarist description, cohesion of a monist one. Truth, for societies which rely on these characterizations for their understanding of the world, is what contributes to equilibrium or participates in cohesion. They

Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine Le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of the Front national go on television to declare that ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front national, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism. Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between human cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?

The Americans gave it a name, PTSD — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had heard about it before: it was something that had to do with army men coming back from the frontline, veterans who had been under a lot of stress. Or survivors of terrorist attacks, bombings, massacres, or big accidents. What I didn’t know was that journalists were also considered a category ‘at risk,’ particularly the ones who had covered conflict or reported in war zones crisis zones. All those who had witnessed episodes of violence, killings, traumatic events, and who had learnt to work and live coping with the anxiety from nearby fighting and constant danger. I saw many of my colleagues devastated — broken — by what they had seen, which often I had seen too. Some never managed to really go back to their normal lives and once, after a crisis that had hit them harder than the many others, decided they had had enough. Among many terrible news came those of the suicide of Stephanie Vaessen’s husband and cameraman — him and Stephanie were two of the people I had shared the tragic days in East Timor with. No worries though. I was doing just fine, as I’d tell myself. At the end of the day, I genuinely believed it: I never really took as many risks as many of the colleagues I had met or shared the most traumatic experiences in the field with, hence I had probably been exposed to a lot less stress. (...)

We might still believe a negative story about our opponent, and we will continue to disagree about many things. But usually, relationships make it harder to dismiss and dehumanize other people.

The prospect of a NATO military intervention to protect Kosovo infuriated Russia in ways American and European leaders failed to appreciate. Serbia and Russia shared Slavic roots, religion, and culture, but Russia’s concerns went deeper. The conflict in Serbia inflamed Russia’s wounded pride over its deflated status since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new Russia lacked the ability to shape world events, which made the American-led actions even harder to swallow.

Ignore ultimatums. The more attention you give to them, the harder it will be for the other side to back down if the situation changes.

Here, the past is prologue. Much of what state-armed forces now face in Fourth Generation wars is simply war as it was fought before the rise of the state and the Peace of Westphalia. Once again, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, religions and gangs are fighting wars, in more and more parts of the world. They fight using many different means, not only conventional engagements and battles. Once again, conflicts have become many-sided rather than two-sided. Officers and enlisted men who find themselves caught up in such conflicts quickly discover they are difficult to understand and even harder to win.

The best leaders “activated” their authority to squelch destructive conflict, when discussion and debate became repetitive, and time pressure necessitated immediate decisions. These flexible leaders “flattened” the hierarchy when creativity, problem-solving, and buy-in were top priorities.

The worship of "safety" above all else is called safetyism. It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration.

Social selection has big implications for mental disorders. When I began treating patients, many wanted help to make them less sensitive to what other people thought about them. It was the 1970s zeitgeist: I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s shed stifling social conventions and follow our bliss. Escaping conformity seemed like a laudable goal. I did my best to help patients achieve those aims, usually with only modest success. As I came to understand how partner selection shapes relationships, I gradually recognized why social anxiety is overwhelmingly common. Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about what other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.114,115 However, trying harder to please others often conflicts with competing for status, creating plenty of conflicts that you hear about in psychotherapy.

When a parent-figure denies a child's reality, they are unconsciously teaching the child to reject their intuition, their "gut feeling". The more we learn to distrust ourselves, the deeper this intuitive voice withdraws, becoming harder and harder to hear. This results in lost intuition and internal conflict. We learn that our judgement cannot be trusted and look to others to shape our reality.

For all its benefits, empathy disappears quickly during most conflicts, and fades away slowly in many long-term relationships. Unfortunately, inadequate empathy erodes trust and makes it harder to solve interpersonal problems.

In December 1776, when Washington’s war-weary troops ground to a halt on the wrong side of the frozen Delaware, the general ordered his officers to read Paine’s words aloud to the exhausted soldiers: These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Huggy was also part of a research team that experimented with “prenups for start-ups.” They created 348 remote teams and asked each to develop a business plan for a wellness product. These new teams could bolster performance when—rather than racing to start their work—members devoted their first meeting to writing a prenup or a “charter” to spell out agreements about the team’s roles, norms, rules, and values. That way, rather than being mired in confusion and conflict about who ought to do what, and what was good and bad behavior, they were ready to charge ahead and develop their business plan.

If extensive and global economic engagement and growing wealth have not already persuaded China to change its behavior, it is unclear why it would be more likely to do so as it grows stronger and thus less susceptible to outside pressure. A state like China, with a deeply entrenched economic model that is fundamentally different from - and in key respects antithetical to - that of the United States, seems more likely to continue the course that has brought it wealth and power... By definition, an established hegemon, able to direct the relevant policies of subordinate states, is harder to eject from its position than a state still grasping for hegemony.

Here’s a common scenario. You’re working with a frustrating coworker or a difficult boss. They ask you to do something and, because you dislike the messenger, you immediately object. There’s this problem or that one, or their request is obnoxious and rude. So you tell them, “No, I’m not going to do it.” Then they retaliate by not doing something that you had previously asked of them. And so the conflict escalates. Meanwhile, if you could step back and see it objectively, you’d probably see that not everything they’re asking for is unreasonable. In fact, some of it is pretty easy to do or is, at least, agreeable. And if you did it, it might make the rest of the tasks a bit more tolerable too. Pretty soon, you’ve done the entire thing. Life (and our job) is difficult enough. Let’s not make it harder by getting emotional about insignificant matters or digging in for battles we don’t actually care about. Let’s not let emotion get in the way of kathêkon, the simple, appropriate actions on the path to virtue.

Conflict is inevitable. As a leader, you have the choice to either avoid it or address it... Even though conflict isn’t easy, the longer you avoid it, the harder it is to address later.

Avoiding failure leads to success. The winner is usually the one who makes the least mistakes. This is true in investing, extreme skiing, business, flying, and many other fields. Win by not losing. Most people die of cancer and heart disease. So yes, avoid that. But those who die from accidents die younger, losing more years of potential life. So try even harder to avoid accidents.

There was always an undercurrent of conflict in the firm. The air crackled with a permanent sense of distrust. In the firm’s toxic worldview, conflict was good. Conflict made people work harder and smarter. It made them ruthless.

far from being in conflict with confidence, or encouraging sloth-like behavior, self-compassion drives confidence—allowing us to take the very risks that build it. It is a safety net that actually enables us to try for more and even harder things. It increases motivation because it cushions failure.

All the men of this party were fishing for rubles, decorations, and promotions, and in this pursuit watched only the weathercock of imperial favor, and directly they noticed it turning in any direction, this whole drone population of the army began blowing hard that way, so that it was all the harder for the Emperor to turn it elsewhere. Amid the uncertainties of the position, with the menace of serious danger giving a peculiarly threatening character to everything, amid this vortex of intrigue, egotism, conflict of views and feelings, and the diversity of race among these people—this eighth and largest party of those preoccupied with personal interests imparted great confusion and obscurity to the common task. Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.

Several times now I have stressed the fact that whatever 'it' is one gets here at Big Sur, one gets it harder, faster, straighter than one would elsewhere. . . . the people here are fundamentally no different than people elsewhere. Their problems are basically the same as those who inhabit the cities, the jungles, the desert or the vast steppes. . . . What is it that makes one's problems (here in Big Sur) assume such a dramatic aspect? Almost melodramatic at times. The place itself has much to do with it. If the soul were to choose an arena in which to stage its agonies, this would be the place for it. One feels exposed — not only to the elements, but to the sight of God. Naked, vulnerable, set agains an overwhelming backdrop of might and majesty, one's problems become magnified because of the proscenium on which the conflict is staged

The conclusion that race is a serious and durable social fault line is not a popular one in the social sciences. Many scholars have downplayed its importance, and have insisted that class differences are the real cause of social conflict. Political scientist Walker Connor, who has taught at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Cambridge, has sharply criticized his colleagues for ignoring ethnic loyalty, which he calls ethnonationalism. He wrote of “the school of thought called ‘nation-building’ that dominated the literature on political development, particularly in the United States after the Second World War:” 'The near total disregard of ethnonationalism that characterized the school, which numbered so many leading political scientists of the time, still astonishes. Again we encounter that divorce between intellectual theory and the real world.' He explained further: 'To the degree that ethnic identity is given recognition, it is apt to be as a somewhat unimportant and ephemeral nuisance that will unquestionably give way to a common identity . . . as modern communication and transportation networks link the state’s various parts more closely.' However: “There is little evidence of modern communications destroying ethnic consciousness, and much evidence of their augmenting it.” Prof. Connor came close to saying that any scholar who ignores ethnic loyalty is dishonest: '[H]e perceives those trends that he deems desirable as actually occurring, regardless of the factual situation. If the fact of ethnic nationalism is not compatible with his vision, it can thus be willed away. . . . [T]he treatment calls for total disregard or cavalier dismissal of the undesired facts.' This harsh judgment may not be unwarranted. Robert Putnam, mentioned above for his research on how racial diversity decreases trust in American neighborhoods, waited five years to publish his data. He was displeased with his findings, and worked very hard to find something other than racial diversity to explain why people in Maine and North Dakota trusted each other more than people in Los Angeles. Setting aside the reluctance academics may have for publishing data that conflict with current political ideals, Prof. Connor wrote that scholars discount racial or ethnic loyalty because of “the inherent limitations of rational inquiry into the realm of group identity.” Social scientists like to analyze political and economic interests because they are clear and rational, whereas Prof. Connor argues that rational calculations “hint not at all at the passions that motivate Kurdish, Tamil, and Tigre guerrillas or Basque, Corsican, Irish, and Palestinian terrorists.” As Chateaubriand noted in the 18th century: “Men don’t allow themselves to be killed for their interests; they allow themselves to be killed for their passions.” Prof. Connor adds that group loyalty is evoked “not through appeals to reason but through appeals to the emotions (appeals not to the mind but to the blood).” Academics do not like the unquantifiable, the emotional, the primitive—even if these things drive men harder than the practical and the rational—and are therefore inclined to downplay or even disregard them.

Churches are notorious for creating competing systems, wherein unclear direction and conflicting information threaten to cause a breakdown and paralyze the ministry. Instead of replacing old systems, we tend to just download and add whatever is new to what already exists. Soon our capacity becomes fragmented and we find ourselves confronted with the signs of ineffectiveness: some ministries seem routine and irrelevant; the teaching feels too academic; calendars are saturated with mediocre programs; staff members pull in opposite directions; volunteers lack motivation; departments viciously compete for resources; and it becomes harder and harder to figure out if we are really being successful. Too many churches desperately need an upgrade. They need to reformat their hard drives and install a clean system. They need to rewrite their code so everyone is clear about what is important and how they should function.

The more we learn to distrust ourselves, the deeper this intuitive voice withdraws, becoming harder and harder to hear. This results in lost intuition and internal conflict. We learn that our judgment cannot be trusted and look to others to shape our reality.

Higher education is now the site of an irresistible drive to moralize and politicize everything, which in turn imposes self-censorship and a risk-averse culture. The polarization and partisanship that characterize politics today renders every dimension of existence, from science to education to sexuality, into a zone of irresolvable ideological conflict, subjecting society to constant moralizing resentment. These domains are important, and just about everyone has an opinion on them. But social media makes it simultaneously easier to be exposed to the dumbest version of any opinion one disagrees with and harder to find reasonable arguments.

Caring about two things at once is hard. It’s certainly harder than caring only about one. But it’s important to say as plainly as possible that there is no conflict between caring about harassment and caring about fair treatment of those on both sides of an accusation