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Natural hazards, however formidable, are inherently less dangerous and less uncertain than fighting hazards. All conditions are more calculable, all obstacles more surmountable than those of human resistance.

B. H. Liddell Hart

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

Military Victory War
While the nominal strength of a country is represented by its numbers and resources, this muscular development is dependent on the state of its internal organs and nerve-system – upon its stability of control, morale, and supply.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Country Military Numbers
The unexpected cannot guarantee success, but it guarantees the best chance of success.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Chance Guarantee Military
For whoever habitually suppresses the truth in the interests of tact will produce a deformity from the womb of his thought.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Military Produce
The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Ideas Military Mind
While there are many causes for which a state goes to war, its fundamental object can be epitomized as that of ensuring the continuance of its policy – in face of the determination of the opposing state to pursue a contrary policy. In the human will lies the source and mainspring of conflict.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Determination Military War
To ensure attaining an objective, one should have alternate objectives. An attack that converges on one point should threaten, and be able to diverge against another. Only by this flexibility of aim can strategy be attuned to the uncertainty of war.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Military War
The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Power Truth War
[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.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Battle Decision Military
This high proportion of history’s decisive campaigns, the significance of which is enhanced by the comparative rarity of the direct approach, enforces the conclusion that the indirect is by far the most hopeful and economic form of strategy.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Direct Approach Hopeful Military
To foster the people’s willing spirit is often as important as to possess the more concrete forms of power.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Important Military People
No man can exactly calculate the capacity of human genius and stupidity, nor the incapacity of will.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Men Military Stupidity
If you want peace, understand war.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Peace Want War
Avoid self-righteousness like the devil- nothing is so self-blinding.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Devil Self Society
A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Bars Pursuit Satisfaction
The urge to gain release from tension by action is a precipitating cause of war.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Causes Gains War

Natural hazards, however formidable, are inherently less dangerous and less uncertain than fighting hazards. All conditions are more calculable, all obstacles more surmountable than those of human resistance.

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Natural hazards, however formidable, are inherently less dangerous and less uncertain than fighting hazards. All conditions are more calculable, all obstacles more surmountable than those of human resistance.

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Popular Authors

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