Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination. The bloody solution of the crisis, the effort for the destruction of the enemy’s forces, is the first-born son of war. Only great and general battles can produce great results. Blood is the price of victory.

— Carl von Clausewitz

Carl von Clausewitz Quotes

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

— Carl von Clausewitz

Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien.

— Carl von Clausewitz

Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity.

— Carl von Clausewitz

No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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

— Carl von Clausewitz

Where absolute superiority is not attainable, you must produce a relative one at the decisive point by making skillful use of what you have.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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.

— Carl von Clausewitz

Knowledge must become capability.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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

— Carl von Clausewitz

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

— Carl von Clausewitz

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.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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.

— Carl von Clausewitz

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind.

— Carl von Clausewitz

Battles decide everything.

— Carl von Clausewitz

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

— Carl von Clausewitz

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.

— Carl von Clausewitz
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