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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
Strategy
Simple
Easy
Doe
Everything
Mean

More quotes by Carl von Clausewitz

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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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The best strategy is always to be very strong.
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War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.
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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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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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Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.
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Rather than comparing [war] to art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale.
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War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.
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Battles decide everything.
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Knowledge must become capability.
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Just as some plants bear fruit only if they don't shoot up too high, so in practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil- experience.
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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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To be practical, any plan must take account of the enemy's power to frustrate it.
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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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Close combat, man to man, is plainly to be regarded as the real basis of combat.
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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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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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Whenever armed forces . . . are used, the idea of combat must be present. . . . The end for which a soldier is recruited, clothed, armed, and trained, the whole object of his sleeping, eating, drinking, and marching is simply that he should fight at the right place and the right time.
Carl von Clausewitz