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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.

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
Nature
Human
Estimate
Humans
Inclined
Always
Pitch
Men
Lows
Strength
Enemy
High

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Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense.
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Politics is the womb in which war develops.
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Four elements make up the climate of war: danger, exertion, uncertainty and chance.
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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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Be audacious and cunning in your plans, firm and persevering in their execution, determined to find a glorious end.
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Boldness becomes rarer, the higher the rank.
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Knowing is different from doing and therefore theory must never be used as norms for a standard, but merely as aids to judgment.
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In war everything is simple, but it's the simple things that are difficult.
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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.
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Self-reliance is the best defence against the pressures of the moment.
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Surprise becomes effective when we suddenly face the enemy at one point with far more troops than he expected. This type of numerical superiority is quite distinct from numerical superiority in general: it is the most powerful medium in the art of war.
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A general who allows himself to be decisively defeated in an extended mountain position deserves to be court-martialled.
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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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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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Desperate affairs require desperate remedies.
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Everything in strategy is very simple, but that does not mean everything is very easy.
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War is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others.
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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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