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Everything in strategy is very simple, but that does not mean everything is very easy.

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
Doe
Everything
Mean
Strategy
Simple
Easy

More quotes by Carl von Clausewitz

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Battles decide everything.
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A certain grasp of military affairs is vital for those in charge of general policy.
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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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We repeat again: strength of character does not consist solely in having powerful feelings, but in maintaining one’s balance in spite of them. Even with the violence of emotion, judgment and principle must still function like a ship’s compass, which records the slightest variations however rough the sea.
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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 the province of danger.
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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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Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.
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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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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.
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Tactics is the art of using troops in battle strategy is the art of using battles to win the war
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War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.
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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 art of war in its highest point of view is policy.
Carl von Clausewitz
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War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.
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Self-reliance is the best defence against the pressures of the moment.
Carl von Clausewitz
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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.
Carl von Clausewitz
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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.
Carl von Clausewitz
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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.
Carl von Clausewitz
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If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits.
Carl von Clausewitz