100 Quotes on Conflict

Any time a diverse team of exceptional members ideates over a problem statement, a difference in opinion is bound to happen. And, more often than not, it is this very dissension that leads to unprecedented innovation.

But, before teams can cross over to the greener side of conflicts, there needs to be a shared understanding of the importance of healthy conflict. Conflicts help create opportunities for teams to innovate and find creative solutions. It challenges one to approach a situation from a fresh new perspective. And when used efficiently, conflict can lead to greater understanding and facilitate more impactful solutions.

Unresolved conflict, on the other hand, can adversely impact the team and in turn, the entire organization. Careless words spoken thoughtlessly can do irreparable damage to interpersonal relationships.

And so, as much as a healthy clash of ideas needs to be enabled and encouraged, conflict management remains an important leadership skill for managers across the board to learn and develop.

Presenting a comprehensive list of 100 insightful quotes on ‘conflict,’ even as team members try and find an effective way to ‘agree to disagree with others.

• 90% of relationship issues are caused by misunderstandings, 9.9% by conflicts of interest. Luckily, ladies and gentlemen can always come to an agreement. — Stefan Emunds
• The quality of our lives depends not on whether or not we have conflicts, but on how we respond to them. — Thomas Crum
• Do not think of knocking out another person’s brain because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago. — Horace Mann
• To be, or not to be: that is the question — Hamlet (Act III, Scene I)
• Healing is the end of the conflict with yourself. — Unknown
• We may have different points of argument from perspectives of belief, faith, and religion. But we must not hate each other. We are one human family. — Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
• The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflict of interest works for us. — Dan Arley
• Marriage means expectations and expectations mean conflict. — Paxton Blair
• Ideas and not battles mark the forward progress of mankind. — L Ron Hubbard
• When introverts are in conflict with each other, it may require a map in order to follow all the silences, nonverbal cues, and passive-aggressive behaviors! — Adam S. McHugh
• If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest. — Silvio Berlusconi
• The need for justice grows out of the conflict of human interests. That is to say, if there were no conflict of interests among mankind, we should never have invented the word justice, nor conceived the idea for which it stands. — Thomas Nixon Carver
• All conflict can be traced back to someone’s feelings getting hurt, don’t you think? — Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies
• When you run for president, you have certain obligations. One of them would be to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest. — Charles Schumer
• An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind. — Mahatma Gandhi
• Today everything’s a conflict of interest. — Sid Vicious
• Often those that criticize others reveal what he himself lacks. — Shannon L. Alder
• My wife Mary and I have been married for forty-seven years and not once have we had an argument serious enough to consider divorce; murder, yes, but divorce, never. — Jack Benny
• The president can’t have a conflict of interest. — Donald Trump
• I have a self-made quote: Celebrate diversity, practice acceptance, and may we all choose peaceful options to conflict. — Donzella Michele Malone
• Did it ever occur to you, that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires – if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? — Ayn Rand
• A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. — Solomon
• Knowing when to fight is just as important as knowing how. — Terry Goodkind
• Peace is better than war because conflict resolutions can be made without waste of life and resources. — Gugu Mona
• You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. — Dale Carnegie
• Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. — Douglas Adams
• When conflict becomes a win-lose contest in our minds, we immediately try to win. — Thomas Crum
• Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret. — Ambrose Bierce
• Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it. — Mahatma Gandhi
• Because people aren’t perfect and relationships are messy, we all need to learn how to resolve conflicts. — John Maxwell
• Conflict can destroy a team, which hasn’t spent time learning to deal with it. — Thomas Isgar
• A willingness to trust and openly listen to alternative ideas and views is essential for collaboration to be successful. — Dale Eilerman
• Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude. — William James
• Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. — Winston Churchill
• I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end. — Margaret Thatcher
• Every conflict we face in life is rich with positive and negative potential. It can be a source of inspiration, enlightenment, learning, transformation, and growth-or rage, fear, shame, entrapment, and resistance. The choice is not up to our opponents, but to us, and our willingness to face and work through them. — Kenneth Cloke
• Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else’s can shorten it. — Cullen Hightower
• The most important thing in any negotiation, almost, is making sure that you strip it of the emotion and deal with the fact. — Howard Baker
• The better able team members are to engage, speak, listen, hear, interpret, and respond constructively, the more likely their teams are to leverage conflict rather than be leveled by it. — Runde and Flanagan
• In a conflict, being willing to change allows you to move from a point of view to a viewing point – a higher, more expansive place, from which you can see both sides. — Thomas Crum
• Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be. — Wayne Dyer
• If we manage conflict constructively, we harness its energy for creativity and development. — Unknown
• They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so are thunder and lightning. — Clint Eastwood
• Arguments drag out because one is too stubborn to forgive and the other is too proud to apologize. — Unknown
• You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. — Harper Lee
• An apology is the superglue of life. It can repair just about anything. — Lynn Johnston
• Conflict is inevitable but combat is optional. — Max Lucado
• Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. — Benjamin Franklin
• The days are too short even for love; how can there be enough time for quarreling? — Margaret Gatty
• There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them. — Phyllis Bottome
• Don’t be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with, the wind. — Hamilton Wright Mabie
• To practice the process of conflict resolution, we must completely abandon the goal of getting people to do what we want. — Marshall B. Rosenberg
• Every fight is on some level a fight between differing ‘angles of vision’ illuminating the same truth. — Mahatma Gandhi
• Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, what else could this mean? — Shannon Alder
• 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. — Saul Alinsky
• Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – is not easy. — Aristotle
• We can often do more for other men by trying to correct our own faults than by trying to correct theirs. — Francois Fenelon
• By the time a man realizes that his father was right, he has a son who thinks he’s wrong. — Charles Wadsworth
• To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. — Aristotle
• The more we run from conflict, the more it masters us; the more we try to avoid it, the more it controls us. The less we fear conflict, the less it confuses us; the less we deny our differences, the less they divide us. — David Augsburger
• If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it’s another nonconformist who doesn’t conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity. — Bill Vaughan
• Never ascribe to an opponent motive meaner than your own. — John M. Barrie
• You do not achieve anything without trouble, ever. — Margaret Thatcher
• One might as well try to ride two horses moving in different directions, as to try to maintain in equal force two opposing or contradictory sets of desires. — Unknown
• No one in history has ever been insulted into an agreement. — Arthur Brooks
• If war is the violent resolution of conflict, then peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather, the ability to resolve conflict without violence. — C.T. Lawrence Butler
• No one in history has ever been insulted into an agreement. — Arthur Brooks
• Instead of suppressing conflicts, specific channels could be created to make this conflict explicit, and specific methods could be set up by which the conflict is resolved. — Albert Low
• Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means. — Ronald Reagan
• One of the most basic principles for making and keeping peace within and between nations...is that in political, military, moral, and spiritual confrontations, there should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat. — Jimmy Carter
• A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt. — G.K. Chesterton
• Every conflict we face in life is rich with positive and negative potential. It can be a source of inspiration, enlightenment, learning, transformation, and growth–or rage, fear, shame, entrapment, and resistance. The choice is not up to our opponents, but to us, and our willingness to face and work through them. — Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith
• You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it. — Doug Conant (CEO of Campbell Soup, as quoted in Harvard Business Review)
• Do not kid yourself- a conflict is never about the surface issue. It is about the ones unsaid, untreated, and unhealed wounds. — Unknown
• To a disciple who was forever complaining about others, the Master said, ‘If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth. — Anthony de Mello
• I believe that the basic nature of human beings is gentle and compassionate. It is therefore in our own interest to encourage that nature, to make it live within us, to leave room for it to develop. If on the contrary, we use violence, it is as if we voluntarily obstruct the positive side of human nature and prevent its evolution. — His Holiness the Dalai Lama
• There is little value in preparing a cookbook of recipes for conflict success. The effects of conflict interaction depend directly on what the participants do mentally with conflict behavior - that is, how they process and interpret their behavior. — William Cupach & Daniel Canary
• The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions. — Barbara Deming
• When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at, change. — Wayne Dyner
• The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The only difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is the way in which we use them. — Adriana Doyle
• Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity and sets us at noting and contriving. — John Dewey
• Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right. — Marie Ebner von Eschenbach
• People are disturbed not by things, but by the view, they take of them. — Epictetus
• We don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Only notes that are different can harmonize. The same is true with people. — Steve Goodier
• The problem with holding a grudge is that your hands are then too full to hold onto anything else. — Seth Godin
• What people often mean by getting rid of conflict is getting rid of diversity, and it is of utmost importance that these should not be considered the same. We may wish to abolish conflict, but we cannot get rid of diversity. Fear of difference is fear of life itself. — Mary Parker Follett
• You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. — Buckminister Fuller
• Don’t fight forces. Use them. — Buckminster Fuller
• If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins. — Benjamin Franklin
• Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. — Robert Frost
• It is possible to conceive conflict as not necessarily a wasteful outbreak of incompatibilities, but a normal process by which socially valuable differences register themselves for the enrichment of all concerned. — Mary Parker Follett
• You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist. — Indira Gandhi
• 10% of conflicts are due to difference in opinion and 90% is due to the wrong tone of voice. — Susan Wiertzema
• Listening is not waiting to talk. — Scott Ginsberg
• Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply. — Stephen R Covey
• What may appear as the truth to one person will often appear as an untruth to another person. But that need not worry the seeker. Where there is honest effort, it will be realized that what appeared to be different truths are like the countless and apparently different leaves of the same tree. — Gandhi
• Conflict cannot survive without your participation. — Wayne Dyer
• It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem. — GK Chesterston
• Deflect, co-opt, absorb or annihilate. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a sword fight or conducting a worldwide military campaign, these are the options for dealing with your opposition. — Graeme Rodaughan, The Day Guard
• The risks of the conflict never overwhelmed me, only the fear of marginalization. — Marie Benedict
• There are some people who always seem angry and continuously look for conflict. Walk away; the battle they are fighting isn’t with you, it is with themselves. — Anonymous

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