Carl von Clausewitz Quotes

If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.

A commander in chief ought to say to himself several times a day: If the enemy should appear on my front, on my right, on my left, what would I do? And if the question finds him uncertain, he is not well placed, he is not as he should be, and he should remedy it.

Anyone that goes to battle goes to battle knowing the mindset and tactics of their enemies.

It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.

The use of drones is rapidly transforming the way we go to war. On the battlefield, a squad leader can receive real-time data from a drone that enables him to view the landscape for miles in every direction, dramatically expanding the capabilities of what would normally have been a small and isolated unit.

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

In Serie A if you have an exceptional physique and you train very well you can destroy any opposing defense.

I can't tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I'd done so much reading.

When one has shot down one's first, second or third opponent, then one begins to find out how the trick is done.

But it is almost impossible to communicate with them [one's spies in the enemy camp] and receive the information they possess ... Even when the general receives from his spies information of movements, he still knows nothing of those which may since have taken place, nor of what the enemy is going finally to attempt.

You never know what even the bad situations will lead to, which I guess is true with anything in life.

So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.

[Donald Trump] has also promised an intelligence surge [in Syria]. Mike Flynn knows a lot about that. Tactically, Mike Flynn has been fantastic with intelligence when he was in the military. They'll be looking at that.

No matter how enmeshed a commander becomes in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to take the enemy into account.

To be a successful soldier, you must know history.

I think everybody handles things very differently and you can conjecture, but until you're put in that situation, you really don't know.

So it is that good warriors take their stance on ground where they cannot lose, and do not overlook conditions that make an opponent prone to defeat.

He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.

The Cold War is over. And our focus has got to be on intelligence, increased manpower, fighting internationally targets.

If we know that our own men are in a condition to attack, but are unaware that the enemy is not open to attack, we have gone only halfway towards victory. If we know that the enemy is open to attack, but are unaware that our own men are not in a condition to attack, we have gone only halfway towards victory. If we know that the enemy is open to attack, and also know that our men are in a condition to attack, but are unaware that the nature of the ground makes fighting impracticable, we have still gone only halfway towards victory.

The best thing to know is what you don't know.

[Donald] Trump is now. And we don't know what the rules are now.

i know he's been looking forward to this--and i know that i've been looking forward to this. but now i have to stop looking forward and start looking at where i am. it's hard.

I don't know what will happen 100 years from now.

...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.