Conflict can help create opportunities to innovate and find creative solutions. It challenges the team to look at a situation from a fresh perspective; which can nudge people to develop a greater understanding and search for alternative avenues that are more efficient.
Let’s take a look at 40+ Quotes for Conflict Resolution, even as we try and understand the right way to disagree with others.
1. There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them.
— Phyllis Bottome
2. Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, What else could this mean?
— Shannon Alder
3. 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
4. To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. — Aristotle
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5. We can often do more for other men by trying to correct our own faults than by trying to correct theirs. — Francois Fenelon
6. By the time a man realizes that his father was right, he has a son who thinks he’s wrong. — Charles Wadsworth
7. Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not easy. — Aristotle
8. 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
9. Never ascribe to an opponent motive meaner than your own. — John M. Barrie
10. You do not achieve anything without trouble, ever. — Margaret Thatcher
11. One might as well try to ride two horses moving in different directions, as to try tomaintain in equal force two opposing or contradictory sets of desires
12. No one in history has ever been insulted into agreement. — Arthur Brooks
13. 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
14. 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
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15. Peace is not absence of conflict; it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means. — Ronald Reagan
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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)
19. Do not kid yourself- a conflict is never about the surface issue. It is about the ones unsaid, untreated and unhealed wounds. — Unknown
20. 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 behaviour—that is, how they process and interpret their behaviour. — William Cupach & Daniel Canary
21. 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
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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. — John Dewey
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25. The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
26. The only difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is the way in which we use them. – Adriana Doyle
27. Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right. — Marie Ebner von Eschenbach
28. The problem with holding a grudge is that your hands are then too full to hold onto anything else. — Seth Godin
29. 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
30. People are disturbed not by things, but by the view they take of them. – Epictetus
31. 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
32. 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
33. 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
34. If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins. — Benjamin Franklin
35. Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. — Robert Frost
36. You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist. — Indira Gandhi
37. What may appear as the truth to one person will often appear as 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
38. Listening is not waiting to talk. — Scott Ginsberg
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39. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply — Stephen R Covey.
40. 10% of conflicts is due to difference in opinion and 90% is due to wrong tone of voice. — Susan Wiertzema
41. Conflict cannot survive without your participation. — Wayne Dyer
42. 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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43. 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
44. The risks of the conflict never overwhelmed me, only the fear of marginalization.” — Marie Benedict
