Quotes & Sayings About Enemy Friends

There's no doubt that I've deserved my enemies, but I don't think I've deserved my friends. — Walt Whitman

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ... are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends. — Walter Lippmann

Those individuals who refuse to join in the lies supporting the war are condemned as being unpatriotic, ill-informed, or friends of the enemy. If the propaganda doesn't silence them and they are seen as a sufficient threat to the war machine, the government will enact laws granting power to arrest and punish those refusing to succumb to the propaganda. This will be done not only to punish the direct targets. It will also be done to frighten others who may be considering boldly challenging the authoritarians supporting a war that will only benefit the special interests. — Ron Paul

This is when family and friends must stand tall and strong - when mettle is tested, refined and purified. We'll survive. We must. And we'll watch the enemy burn in the fire. — Jason Price

Friends are nothing but a known enemy — Kurt Cobain

The Lord gives us friends to push us to our potential - and enemies to push us beyond it. — Robert Breault

Commerce makes friends, religion makes enemies; the one enriches, and the other impoverishes; the one thrives best where the truth is told, the other where falsehoods are believed. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected. — Bertrand Russell

Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing. — Jessica Mitford

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task. — Diogenes

In Jesus and for Him, enemies and friends alike are to be loved. — Thomas A Kempis

My friends ... today, we are not Fey, Celierian, or dahl'reisen, but brothers, united and strong, each of us honorable and worthy warriors of Light. We are the steel no enemy can shatter. We are the magic no Dark power can defeat. We are the rock upon which evil breaks like waves. We are warriors of honor, champions of Light. — C.L. Wilson

An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth,
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive. — Terry Pratchett

Don't forgive and never forget; Do unto others before they do unto you; and third and most importantly, keep your eye on your friends, because your enemies will take care of themselves! — JR

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends. — Oscar Wilde

I count myself really fortunate that I have some lifelong friends. The best thing about a friend is when you are being your own worst enemy a friend can help snap you out of it. — Amy Grant

We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection. — Jean Paul

Our friends, the enemy. — Pierre-Jean De Beranger

Though it is a great mistake to make friends of the wicked and foolish, it is unwise to make enemies of them, for they are very numerous. — John Lubbock

Friends can be useful. If nothing else, a friend is one less enemy. — Joe Abercrombie

We ought not to make those people our enemies who might have become our friends, if we had only known them better. — Jean De La Bruyere

A prince is also respected when he is either a true friend or a downright enemy, that to say, when, without any reservation, he declares himself in favour of one party against the other; which course will always be more advantageous than standing neutral; because if two of your powerful neighbours come to blows, they are of such a character that, if one of them conquers, you have either to fear him or not. In either case it will always be more advantageous for you to declare yourself and to make war strenuously; because, in the first case, if you do not declare yourself, you will invariably fall a prey to the conqueror, to the pleasure and satisfaction of him who has been conquered, and you will have no reasons to offer, nor anything to protect or to shelter you. Because he who conquers does not want doubtful friends who will not aid him in the time of trial; and he who loses will not harbour you because you did not willingly, sword in hand, court his fate. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Well, until next time.' Sadie threw her arms around Annabeth. Annabeth was a little shocked to be getting a hug from a girl she'd just met - a girl who could just as easily have seen Annabeth as an enemy. But the gesture made her feel good. In life-and-death situations, Annabeth had learned, you could make friends pretty quickly. She patted Sadie's shoulder. 'Stay safe. — Rick Riordan

You talk to your enemies, not just your friends. — James Baker

And what's the irony?
...

In the end... we call the enemy friends... the fake people again friends... should I continue here with the words? — Deyth Banger

It is easier to lose friends than to win over enemies.
Overnight one becomes your enemy.
Over centuries a man refuses to be your friend. — Matshona Dhliwayo

We must endeavor to forget our former love for them [the British] and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. — Thomas Jefferson

Charles Schwab: Be friends with everybody. When you have friends you will know there is somebody who will stand by you. You know the old saying, that if you have a single enemy you will find him everywhere. It doesn't pay to make enemies. Lead the life that will make you kind and friendly to everyone about you, and you will be surprised what a happy life you will live. — John C. Maxwell

I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies — George W. Bush

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution. — Mao Zedong

Old friends become bitter enemies on a sudden for toys and small offenses. — Robert Burton

They ought to be gentle to their friends and dangerous to their enemies. — Plato

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape - Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this - the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'
I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year'). — Christopher Hitchens

More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All my friends were girls. Then my mom's strident feminism for years where men were thought of as the enemy, I just didn't know what the right way to be a man was. — Michael Ian Black

A good man is kinder to his enemy than bad men are to their friends. — Joseph Hall

My friends know that they're my friends - even my enemies know that they're my friends. — George Foreman

For the young, death is an enemy they wish to try their strength against. For those of us a little older, she is an old friend, an old lover, but one we are not eager to meet again soon. — Robert Jordan

One not need make peace with friends, only with enemies — Imi Lichtenfeld

Don't make the mistake of underestimating your enemies. — Bohdi Sanders

I thought it was keep your friends close so you have someone to drive the car when you sneak over to your enemy's house at night and throw up in his mailbox,
-Jace — Cassandra Clare

It is easy to love friends and sweethearts. This is selfish love. Higher love embraces enemies and all ugly, bad people. The highest love doesn't see goodness or badness at all. One should even love warmongers, bad food producers and priests. — Michio Kushi

I have a feeling of - wanting to confront my enemies. No, of wanting to confront the enemy part of my friends. — James Kirkwood Jr.

An indiscreet man is more hurtful than an ill-natured one; for as the latter will only attack his enemies, and those he wishes ill to, the other injures indifferently both friends and foes. — Joseph Addison

Be friends of everyone. Be enemies of no-one — Charles Wesley

Keep their friends close and their enemies closer. — Sun Tzu

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good. — Jonathan Swift

Friends can betray you, but with an old enemy, you always know where you stand. — Raymond E. Feist

You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies. — Yitzhak Rabin

Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends ... — Thomas Hardy

The real test of one's belief in the doctrine of Habeas Corpus is not when one demands its application on behalf of one's friends but of one's enemies. — Clement Attlee

The enemy stays in the hearts of friends. Watch what your friends know about you and watch what you tell your friends, remember, egoism breeds jealousy and ends a relationship in discord. — Michael Bassey Johnson

He had left a certain mode of life and chosen another and between that life and this a river ran, as impassable as the river of death. And now he wanted to get back madly, desperately, but he couldn't, not even though he knew that the river was nothing but the inhibitions of his own mind ... A normal man who has lived utterly alone for a long time ceases to be normal. A solitary who has cut himself off from human contact comes to have a terror of his fellow humans. A coward who had abandoned all responsibility is afraid to shoulder it again. A failure cannot trust to success. A sufferer who has been broken by life dare not be friends with it again ... It was only his own mind that kept him back but a man's mind can be his greatest friend or his greatest enemy, according as it serves or binds his will, and his was his enemy. Its terrors controlled him. He was bound hand and foot by his own weakness. It was no use. He was a good as dead. I cannot get back. — Elizabeth Goudge

You are well aware that it is not numbers or strength that bring the victories in war. No, it is when one side goes against the enemy with the gods' gift of a stronger morale that their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them. I have noticed this point too, my friends, that in soldiering the people whose one aim is to keep alive usually find a wretched and dishonorable death, while the people who, realizing that death is the common lot of all men, make it their endeavour to die with honour, somehow seem more often to reach old age and to have a happier life when they are alive. These are facts which you too should realize (our situation demands it) and should show that you yourselves are brave men and should call on the rest to do likewise. — Xenophon

Get rid of the friends who want you to spend your whole day doing nothing with them. They're not your friends. They're your enemies. — Gene Simmons

Keep your friends close and your enemies dead. — Paul Dale

Friends are sometimes boring, but enemies never. — Mason Cooley

Never say things to friends which you don't want to hear from enemies. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. — John Fowles

Friend: A potential enemy with whom relations have not yet deteriorated to all-out war — Bangambiki Habyarimana

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends. — P.D. James

Do I not damage my enemies after i make them my close friends? — Abraham Lincoln

What your enemies know can hurt you,
but what your friends know can destroy you. — Matshona Dhliwayo

It is normal to have enemies,
common to have acquaintances,
and unusual to have friends. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Another way to put an end to self-rejection is ask yourself whether what you're telling yourself is what a friend would say, or what an enemy would. Friends are supportive. Enemies put us down and undermine our confidence. So if you say something that an enemy would say, stop. Answer back, 'I'm going to be supportive of myself. As a friend, what I have to say to myself is ... ' Then say something supportive. — Mira Kirshenbaum

Turn enemies into friends by doing something nice for them. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

The most disagreeable thing that your worst enemy says to your face does not approach what your best friends say behind your back. — Alfred De Musset

The good man has his enemies. He would not be like His Lord if he had not. If we were without enemies we might fear that we were not the friends of God, for friendship of the world is enmity to God. — Charles Spurgeon

That man is rich indeed who has more friends than enemies, fears no one, and is so busy building that he has no time to devote to tearing down another's hopes and plans. — Napoleon Hill

Money couldn't buy friends, but you got a better class of enemy. — Spike Milligan

I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like 'Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,' then I run on, say to 'David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha' though I don't use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words 'equally a coming Buddha' I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think 'equally a coming Buddha' you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's eyes. — Jack Kerouac

When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us. — Octavia E. Butler

I was now well prepared to be a career criminal. I had the proper training and a natural feel for the business. I had a respect for the old-liners like Angelo and Don Frederico. I had been a witness to both murder and betrayal and had my appetite whetted for acts of revenge.
I just didn't have the stomach for any of it.
I didn't want my life to be a lonely and sinister on, where even the closest of friends could overnight turn into an enemy who needed to be eliminated. If I went the way Angelo had paved, I would earn millions, but would never be allowed to taste the happiness and enjoyment such wealth often brings. I would rule over a dark world, a place where treachery and deceit would be at my side and never know the simple pleasures of an ordinary life. p368. — Lorenzo Carcaterra

I heard my mother talking badly of me to people who were talking badly of me in her salon. That's probably the thing that I'm most sensitive of in all my friendships and my relationships. I just ... I just can't take that. I'm comfortable with enemies, but I can't take it from friends. — Vincent Gallo

You see, we are here, as far as I can tell, to help each other; our brothers, our sisters, our friends, our enemies. That is to help each other and not hurt each other. — Stevie Ray Vaughan

If elementary training in neighbor love focuses on family and friends, in secondary neighbor-love studies, we learn to see the outlier, the outsider, the outcast, the stranger, the alien, and even the enemy as neighbors too. Such an education can be deeply subversive, some might even say unpatriotic. After all, political figures, military leaders, and rising demagogues consistently consolidate power by scapegoating and dehumanizing an outsider, an outcast, or an enemy. But — Brian McLaren

The outsiders have become kings and queens of the castle. It is a whole lot easier to sit outside the tent and throw firecrackers inside; it is much, much harder to sit inside the tent and govern not only your enemies, but your close friends as well. — Hal Rothman

Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss. — Edward Abbey

The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies. — Jean-Baptiste Say

You cannot make friends of your enemies by making enemies of your friends. — Morton Blackwell

Be wary of friends - they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them. — Robert Greene

Enemies and friends act like spiritual coaches. They round out the rough spots on Soul's unfoldment. The Mahanta (inner spiritual guide) teaches through others. So pay careful attention when sparks fly, because some important things in you - perhaps courage or forgiveness - needs some polish. — Harold Klemp

A mafia could never kill an alliance. That's how you become safe from the enemy, you befriend them. — Basma Salem

I don't want enemies. I want friends, and I want them in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and loving whoever they want to. — Kevin Hart

Your mind can be your enemy or friend. If you always follow your heart, your mind will feel neglected. If you follow only your mind, your heart will never forgive you. Never ignore your conscience, yet always be conscious of reason. Make your heart and mind friends and you will have peace of mind throughout life's seasons. — Suzy Kassem

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
This is why our educated teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic. — David Foster Wallace

I decided it would be helpful to provide an example, drawing on a story in which emotional behavior would have led to disastrous consequences. "Imagine," I said, "you're hiding in a basement. The enemy is searching for you and your friends. Everyone has to keep totally quiet, but your baby is crying." I did an impression, as Gene would, to make the story more convincing: "Waaaaa." I paused dramatically. "You have a gun. — Graeme Simsion

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy. — Fredrik Backman

God guard me from my friends, for I shall guard myself from my enemies. — James Howell

The medics generally see the worst of the worst. They see everything. They're working on their friends, and they're working on their enemy. The person that was just firing at them, trying to kill them, five minutes ago, if an Army medic stumbles upon him and he's still alive, he just goes to save his life. — Brendan Fehr

Friend' is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never. — Victor Hugo

It's easier to fight one's enemies than to get on with one's friends. — Jean Francois Paul De Gondi

Friends should be very delicate and careful in administering pity as medicine, when enemies use the same article as poison. — John Frederick Boyes

Better to have an open enemy, than hidden friends. — Napoleon Bonaparte

There are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, just permanent interests. — Carol Moseley Braun

More people have been ruined by their upright friends than ever have been by their enemies! — Leslie Ford

It's an old axiom of mine: marry your enemies and behead your friends. — Robert N. Lee

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends. — Charles Caleb Colton

The boy she'd once loved was gone, and she'd accept it. But even if she didn't want Eric back, he'd hurt her. He was the enemy, and the Universal Girl Code stipulated friends should band together in hating the ****** till death. — Melissa Landers