Ferdinand Foch Quotes

War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.

The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guess what was at the other side of the hill'.

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.

I think that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake.

President Bush admitted that the United States went to war in Iraq based on bad intelligence. But he says knowing what we know now he would still do it again. So at least we're learning from our mistakes.

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 which they are embarking.

The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy. ... Red China is not the powerful nation seeking to dominate the world.

Old men declare war because they have failed to solve complex political and economic problems.

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.

Those who start war often know that because of their high political position their own lives will not be in danger. on the Diane Rehm Show.

No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique.

If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.... I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.

Going to war is an easy decision.

If you don’t have a good idea of what to do next after using military force, then don’t use it in the first place.

Any clever person can make plans for winning a war if he has no responsibility for carrying them out.

When I get the point, I often don't know what to do with it.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war without knowing what she was doing, I would not have had our people in Iraq. Iraq was disaster.

This idea of anticipation is key to investing and to business generally. You can't wait for an opportunity to become obvious. You have to think, "Here's what other people and companies have done under certain circumstances. Now, under these new circumstances, how is this management likely to behave?"

You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.

They [politicians] have defined the war simply in terms of the detonation of explosives. When you look at the broader picture, America is mired in two wars that we're losing at the moment. We have a political environment that is as poisonous as anything I've seen, at least since the end of Vietnam.

There is no working middle course in wartime.

I think anything is better than war. The extent to which one can negotiate with fanatics, I have no idea. I don't know.

The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.

A state attacked by another which renews an old claim rarely yields it without a war: it prefers to defend its territory, as is always more honorable. But it may be advantageous to take the offensive, instead of awaiting the attack on the frontiers.