Carl von Clausewitz Quotes

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

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

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

Only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent.

Never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.

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

The fortune of war is always doubtful.

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.

Nothing really ever happens like you imagine it will.

When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.

I have seen players and coaches come and go, but through it all, I have always known Cleveland is where I want to retire. But life doesn't always work the way you want it to, and at the end of the day, the saying, 'This is a business,' is unfortunately true.

In the world of 'Power,' no good deed goes unpunished. I don't really look at it as karma in the world of 'Power.' Whenever any character thinks they're on safe ground, they get the world pulled up from under them.

There's never any guarantee at war.

Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

Things are always different from what they might be.

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.

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

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

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.

In war, the chief incalculable is the human will.

The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.