Carl von Clausewitz Quotes

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

The chief incalculable in war is the human will.

There's never any guarantee at war.

War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. ... war is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope; no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder. Chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events.

This is impossible to predict. War may break out unexpectedly.

War is the province of chance. In no sphere of human activity is such a margin to be left for this intruder. It increases the uncertainty of every circumstance, and deranges the course of events.

War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.

War always takes you by surprise.

In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.

What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.

War is not neat. It's not tidy. It's a mess.

There will be plenty of fighting in the coming years and in a magnitude far beyond this. Prepare yourself.

When you start a military intervention, you do not know what will happen even in the next hour

The unknown is the governing condition of war.

It's impossible to know what happens in the fog of war.

I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.

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.

War is...a trinity of violence, chance, and reason.

No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.

In war, important events result from trivial causes.

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 distance.

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.

History has been the history of warfare.

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.

War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.