Energy and safety are the two most important concerns in the field of energetic materials (EMs). And it is universally believed that there exists an inevitable and inherent contradiction between them: the higher energy goes with the lower safety, i.e., the so-called energy and safety(E& S) contradiction. This article discusses the contradiction in combination with many counterexamples showing that the contradiction is not always the case. It is found that the contradiction is structure-level dependent: only on the level of molecule, the E& S contradiction appears most necessarily and remarkably as an inherent one; while, on the higher levels of crystal and mixture, the E& S contradiction can certainly be alleviated. Moreover, we think that the energy and safety of EMs are originated from a sense of more thermodynamics and a sense of more kinetics of chemical reactions, respectively, and thus the E& S contradiction is a thermodynamic-kinetic one. Accordingly, we stress again a strategy for developing EMs, i.e., the nature of increasing the energy is to increase the chemical energy stored in molecules and to enhance the molecular packing compactness; while, the principle of enhancing safety, or reducing sensitivity, is to make external stimuli more and more insufficient to ignite EMs, through crystal engineering and mixing technologies.