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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.

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
Means
Reaching
Political
Considered
Form
Object
Mean
Objects
Never
Goal
Purpose
Peace
Purposes
War
Isolation

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War is the province of danger.
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Be audacious and cunning in your plans, firm and persevering in their execution, determined to find a glorious end.
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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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Only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent.
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Self-reliance is the best defence against the pressures of the moment.
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Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations this serves more or less as a substitute for hatred between individuals.
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War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale.
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In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.
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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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No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy
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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.
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War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.
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The difficulty of accurate recognition constitutes one of the most serious sources of friction in war, by making things appear entirely different from what one had expected.
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War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.
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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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It is even better to act quickly and err than to hesitate until the time of action is past.
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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.
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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.
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Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.
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