“It is only to clear from history that states rarely keep faith with each other, save in so far (and so long) as their promises seem to them to combine with their interests.”

The more usual reason for adopting a strategy of limited aim is that of awaiting a change in the balance of force … The essential condition of such a strategy is that the drain on him should be disproportionately greater than on oneself.

No man can exactly calculate the capacity of human genius and stupidity, nor the incapacity of will.

A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.

The higher level of grand strategy [is] that of conducting war with a far-sighted regard to the state of the peace that will follow.

To foster the people’s willing spirit is often as important as to possess the more concrete forms of power.

In the case of a state that is seeking not conquest but the maintenance of its security, the aim is fulfilled if the threat is removed – if the enemy is led to abandon his purpose.

The unexpected cannot guarantee success, but it guarantees the best chance of success.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

If you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down.

[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.

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.

The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move – so that, as in ju-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow.

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

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.

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.

Air forces offered the possibility of striking a the enemy’s economic and moral centres without having first to achieve ‘the destruction of the enemy’s main forces on the battlefield’. Air-power might attain a direct end by indirect means – hopping over opposition instead of overthrowing it.

The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.

Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.

Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

The peace of our world is indivisible. As long as negative forces are getting the better of positive forces anywhere, we are all at risk.

The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.