Talk:The enemy of my enemy is my friend

message: Man, that's where I first heard this phrase.  Shouldn't the entry say SOMETHING about that movie????    jcm 5/1/8
:Considering that the phrase pre-dates the movie by several thousand years, and appears in many historical contexts throughout the world, I'm going to say no.  24.6.66.193 (talk) 07:26, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Several hundred years, not several thousand. 73.70.13.107 (talk) 19:01, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd say any culturally relevant invocations of the phrase should be included Flameoguy (talk) 05:48, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Alien vs. Predator]] 

message: I have put the term friend in quotients as it is a social construct not easily applied to animals.--Wilson 18:02, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Did you mean "quotes"?  (A quotient is the result of dividing one number by another.) 24.6.66.193 (talk) 07:33, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  In Nature 

message: Has anyone heard this phrase, or quoted inpart in the Quarn?  Almost all of my Muslim Somali students have heard this phrase - take care...  Dinkytown (talk) 05:04, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Muslim context?

message: "This has been shown before, such as when US - backed militia in Afghanistan fighting the occupying Soviet Union are now one of its greatest enemies."  - That is at least an example of poor grammar and arguably false in other ways.  Also "In many respects, the USSR and the USA posed far greater threats to each other than Nazi Germany ever did." is largely true in that the USA and USSR had nuclear weapons, but the Nazis where only limited as a potential threat by the fact that other countries united against them.  Its probably not the best example of an argument against "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", esp. considering the threat of the USA and USSR to each other was mostly potential, while in WWII hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions of Russians died.  twfowler (talk) 23:47, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticisms 

message: The "varitions" passage is just silly and irrelevant, should it be removed?
 - 81.103.21.106 (talk) 22:25, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Variations 

message: "The doctrine can also be seen in the business partnerships formed over the years. One example might be in the speculated purchase of Yahoo! by Microsoft in an attempt to gain marketshare from Google in the online search engine market.[10]http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/03/technology/microsoft_yahoo/index.htm"
IIRC, Yahoo's CEOs didn't have a choice in the matter, it was the shareholders, who are there to make short to mid-term profit, they could, for the majority at least, not care less whether the company survives.
24.113.84.167 (talk) 09:07, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  'In Business' Removed 

message: The origin is Chinese, not Arab.  The phrase "My enemy's enemy is my friend", and various translations thereof, is attributed to Sun Tzu (6th century BCE) in The Art of War.  Sun Tzu lived during the later years of the Old Chinese (language) period, about 300 years before the founding of the first Chinese Empire - which happened about a century after Old Chinese finished its evolution into Middle Chinese (c. 4th century BC to c. 12th century CE).  In the same way that Latin became Italian, French, Spanish, Galician, etc., Middle Chinese became Mandarin, Yue, Hakka, etc. - but whereas the Roman Empire had fallen apart prior to the development of these other languages, China never has; so that all or most of the languages that evolved from Middle Chinese formally call themselves "Chinese".  Additionally, because all of the Chinese languages are written logographically instead of phonetically, and because all of them use the same Middle Chinese-derived system of logographs; there is essentially only one written Chinese language despite being almost a dozen spoken ones - because, while phono-graphs represent sounds, logographs represent things.  It is thus possible to read Chinese characters as if they were English, French, or any other language; that is, you can learn to read Chinese without learning how to speak it (and vice-versa).
:It appears that the one citation about the origin of this phrase/proverb is broken, and the supposedly Arabic origin is not cited at all. Does anyone have any valid citatiosn for the origins of this proverb?
Merpius (talk) 14:45, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin - Pre-Imperial China (Sun Tzu) 

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thread_title:  External links modified