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Four elements make up the climate of war: danger, exertion, uncertainty and chance.

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
Elements
Danger
Four
Chance
War
Make
Exertion
Uncertainty
Climate

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The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
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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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The art of war in its highest point of view is policy.
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Blood is the price of victory
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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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A conqueror is always a lover of peace.
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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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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.
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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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Responsibility and danger do not tend to free or stimulate the average person's mind- rather the contrary but wherever they do liberate an individual's judgement and confidence we can be sure that we are in the presence of exceptional ability.
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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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War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.
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Politics is the womb in which war develops.
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Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
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In war the will is directed at an animate object that reacts.
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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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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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There are very few men-and they are the exceptions-who are able to think and feel beyond the present moment
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In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.
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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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