Quote

All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.

Carl von Clausewitz

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Carl von Clausewitz
Age: 51 †
Born: 1780
Born: June 1
Died: 1831
Died: November 16
Historian
Military Historian
Military Officer
Military Personnel
Military Theorist
Philosopher
Writer
Burg bei Magdeburg
Like
Speak
Fog
Action
Moonlight
Place
Twilight
Seems
Tends
Kind
Larger
Really
Seem
Make
Takes
Things
Often
Grotesque

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Politics is the womb in which war develops.
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Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
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Only great and general battles can produce great results
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Close combat, man to man, is plainly to be regarded as the real basis of combat.
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There are times when the utmost daring is the height of wisdom.
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With uncertainty in one scale, courage and self-confidence should be thrown into the other to correct the balance. The greater they are, the greater the margin that can be left for accidents.
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To achieve victory we must mass our forces at the hub of all power & movement. The enemy's 'Center of Gravity'
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Four elements make up the climate of war: danger, exertion, uncertainty and chance.
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Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy's strength too high than too low, such is human nature.
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To be practical, any plan must take account of the enemy's power to frustrate it.
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The more a general is accustomed to place heavy demands on his soldiers, the more he can depend on their response.
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War is only caused through the political intercourse of governments and nations - war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means.
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War is an act of force, and to the application of that force there is no limit. Each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and a reciprocal action results which in theory can have no limit.
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Only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent.
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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.
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War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.
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Responsibility and danger do not tend to free or stimulate the average person's mind- rather the contrary but wherever they do liberate an individual's judgement and confidence we can be sure that we are in the presence of exceptional ability.
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I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.
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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.
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