No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.
Boldness governed by superior intellect is the mark of a hero.
Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien.
Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity.
No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy.
It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition.
Timidity is the root of prudence in the majority of men.
Where absolute superiority is not attainable, you must produce a relative one at the decisive point by making skillful use of what you have.
What we should admire is the acute fulfillment of the unspoken assumptions, the smooth harmony of the whole activity, which only become evident in the final success.
In War, the young soldier is very apt to regard unusual fatigues as the consquence of faults, mistakes, and embarrassment in the conduct of the whole, and to become distressed and depondent as a consequence. This would not happen if he had been prepared for this beforehand by exercises in peace.
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.
Knowledge must become capability.
War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.
In war more than anywhere else, things do not turn out as we expect.
The side that feels the lesser urge for peace will naturally get the better bargain.
The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing practical to alter or deflect the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the very idea of war.
Der Krieg ist nichts als eine Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit Einmischung anderer Mittel. War is merely the continuation of policy with the admixture of other means.
Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind.
Battles decide everything.
The very nature of interactions is bound to make it unpredictable.
Politics is the womb in which war develops – where its outlines already exist in their hidden rudimentary form, like the characteristics of living creatures in their embryos.