With growing experience, all skillful commanders sought to profit by the power of the defensive, even when on the offensive.

For even the best of peace training is more theoretical than practical experience ... indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider.

[The] aim is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this. In other words, dislocation is the aim of strategy.

An army should always be so distributed that its parts can aid each other and combine to produce the maximum possible concentration of force at one place, while the minimum force necessary is used elsewhere to prepare the success of the concentration.

For whoever habitually suppresses the truth in the interests of tact will produce a deformity from the womb of his thought.

As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next war.

In reality, it si more fruitful to wound than to kill. While the dead man lies still, counting only one man less, the wounded man is a progressive drain upon his side.