Carl Von Clausewitz Quotes

A conqueror is always a lover of peace.

War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

Every combat is the bloody and destructive measuring of the strength of forces, physical and moral; whoever at the close has the greatest amount of both left is the conqueror.

Whoever does great things with small means has successfully reached the goal.

[...] to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity

...as man under pressure tends to give in to physical and intellectual weakness, only great strength of will can lead to the objective.

War is the province of chance. In no sphere of human activity is such a margin to be left for this intruder. It increases the uncertainty of every circumstance, and deranges the course of events.

Talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.

There is only one decisive victory: the last.

Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense.

In war more than anywhere else, things do not turn out as we expect.

Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy's strength too high than too low, such is human nature.

War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.

The very nature of interactions is bound to make it unpredictable.

Only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent.

There are times when the utmost daring is the height of wisdom.

War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.

No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.

In war everything is simple, but it's the simple things that are difficult.

War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy

Boldness governed by superior intellect is the mark of a hero.

There are cases in which the greatest daring is the greatest wisdom.

The more a general is accustomed to place heavy demands on his soldiers, the more he can depend on their response.

War is merely a continuation of politics.

We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale.

War is politics by other means.

Boldness becomes rarer, the higher the rank.

The art of war in its highest point of view is policy.

Everything in strategy is very simple, but that does not mean everything is very easy.

Knowledge in war is very simple, being concerned with so few subjects, and only with their final results at that. But this does not make its application easy.

Just as some plants bear fruit only if they don't shoot up too high, so in practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil- experience.

War is the province of danger.

The side that feels the lesser urge for peace will naturally get the better bargain.

In war, while everything is simple, even the simplest thing is difficult. Difficulties accumulate and produce frictions which no one can comprehend who has not seen war.

Desperate affairs require desperate remedies.

The only situation a commander can know fully is his own: his opponent's he can know only from unreliable intelligence.

A general who allows himself to be decisively defeated in an extended mountain position deserves to be court-martialled.

Timidity is the root of prudence in the majority of men.

In War more than anywhere else in the world things happen differently to what we had expected, and look differently when near, to what they did at a distance.

Of all the passions that inspire a man in a battle, none, we have to admit, is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honor and reknown.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes.

In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.

Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.

All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.

Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.

War is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others.

A certain grasp of military affairs is vital for those in charge of general policy.