All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.

Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes.

To discover how much of our resources must be mobilized for war, we must first examine our political aim and that of the enemy. We must gauge the strength and situation of the opposite state. We must gauge the character and abilities of its government and people and do the same in regard to our own. Finally, we must evaluate the political sympathies of other states and the effect the war may have on them.

In War more than anywhere else in the world things happen differently to what we had expected, and look differently when near, to what they did at a distance.

With uncertainty in one scale, courage and self-confidence should be thrown into the other to correct the balance. The greater they are, the greater the margin that can be left for accidents.

In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.