Carl von Clausewitz Quotes

In war more than anywhere else, things do not turn out as we expect.

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

The chief incalculable in war is the human will.

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

We don't know what may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

He who wars, walks in a mist, through which the keenest eyes cannot always discern the right path.

No sir, anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

War is like night, she said. It covers everything.

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.

She doesn't know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be.

To make a war, sometimes it is necessary that everyone guess wrong.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

Viewed as a drama, the war is somewhat disappointing.

We talk about spreading democracy and freedom all over the world, but they are to us words rather than conditions. We haven't even got them here in America, and the farther we get into this war the farther we get away from democracy and freedom. Where is it leading us to, and when will it end? The war might stop this winter, but that is improbable. It may go on for fifty years or more. That also is improbable. The elements are too conflicting and confused to form any accurate judgment of its length. There may be a series of wars, one after another, going on indefinitely.

Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.

War is a matter of vital importance to the state.

If you think I would have gone to war the way George Bush did, don't vote for me.

It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

Wars are to be won with swords and spears, not with rice and salt.

Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.