Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind..

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish ... the kind of war on wh….

Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy's strength too high than too low, such is human nature..

Strength of character does not consist solely in having powerful feelings, but in maintaining one's balance in spite of them..

Every age has its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions and its own peculiar preconceptions..

War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds..

The more a leader is in the habit of demanding from his men, the surer he will be that his demands will be answered..

The best strategy is always to be very strong..

Desperate affairs require desperate remedies..

In war everything is simple, but it's the simple things that are difficult..

It is paltry philosophy if in the old-fashioned way one lays down rules and principles in total disregard of moral values . As soon as these appear o….

Where absolute superiority is not attainable, you must produce a relative one at the decisive point by making skillful use ofwhat you have..

Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves more or less as a substitute for hatred between individuals..

The majority of people are timid by nature, and that is why they constantly exaggerate danger. all influences on the military leader, therefore, comb….

Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense..

Our knowledge of circumstances has increased, but our uncertainty, instead of having diminished, has only increased. The reason of this is, that we d….

We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War i….

Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are ….

In War more than anywhere else in the world things happen differently to what we had expected, and look differently when near, to what they did at a ….

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 ….

In short, absolute, so-called mathematical, factors never find a firm basis in military calculations. From the very start, there is an interplay of p….