Clausewitz Quotes

“The idea of the British philosophers Berkeley and Hume that man did not passively observe and absorb knowledge, but rather by the process of observation created it and moulded the world through his own consciousness, had taken deep hold in Germany. Clausewitz did not need to read the works of his contemporary Kant (and there is no evidence that he did) to become familiar with these ideas which formed the basis of Kant’s philosophy. He had also absorbed those that had re-entered philosophical thought with the revival of Hellenism and were so powerfully to influence the work of the young Hegel: the Socratic distinctions between the ideal and its manifestations, between the absolute, unattainable concept and the imperfect approaches to it in the real world.”
― Michael Eliot Howard, Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction

“As a result there developed in the Prussian middle classes the impression that the king’s wars were nothing to do with them; and from that it was a small step to the belief that, if it were not for the king and the nobility who fought his wars, those wars need never happen at all. Immanuel Kant was only one of the many Prussian writers who from 1780 onwards were arguing that if only the affairs of States were in the hands of rational, humane men, the world might enjoy perpetual peace. It was a view dominant in Prussian university and intellectual circles until the catastrophe of Jena shocked them into political awareness and set on foot the new nationalist movement that was to have such momentous consequences.”
― Michael Eliot Howard, Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction

“His studies in aesthetic theory taught him that the artist did not succeed simply by learning and applying a given set of rules, but rather that those rules had significance only as indications of what great artists had actually done, and had to be modified as the innovations and perceptions of new generations enriched the comprehension of their subject. All art, all thought (for as Clausewitz himself expressed it, all thought is art), was a creative activity, not an imitative or derivative one. And the same applied with a particular force to the conduct of war.”
― Michael Eliot Howard, Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction