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A general who allows himself to be decisively defeated in an extended mountain position deserves to be court-martialled.
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
General
Decisively
Position
Extended
Deserves
Defeated
Allows
Court
Mountain
Deserve
More quotes by Carl von Clausewitz
Knowledge must become capability.
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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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In war, while everything is simple, even the simplest thing is difficult. Difficulties accumulate and produce frictions which no one can comprehend who has not seen war.
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The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
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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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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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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.
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Battles decide everything.
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To be practical, any plan must take account of the enemy's power to frustrate it.
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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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Only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent.
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Close combat, man to man, is plainly to be regarded as the real basis of combat.
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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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In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.
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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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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.
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In 1793 such a force as no one had any conception of made its appearance. War had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the State... By this participation of the people in the war... a whole Nation with its natural weight came into the scale.
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War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.
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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 very nature of interactions is bound to make it unpredictable.
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