Carl von Clausewitz Quotes
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.
von Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 85.
Describing the NASA safety program at the time of the Challenger disaster:
He is absolutely right, but unfortunately made this statement several years after he served as the Fed Chairman. He never made a statement like this when he and his colleagues made their policies based on their economic forecasting. Central bankers have generally felt that one of their jobs was to give the people confidence in the nation’s banking system and economy and the admission that much policy making was based on “coin toss” forecasting.
Carl Philipp Gottfried (or Gottlieb) von Clausewitz was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" (meaning, in modern terms, psychological) and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege transl. On War, was unfinished at his death.
