Martin Van Creveld's Quotes

If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot.

The enemy resembles us. Therefore, he needs to be approached not as an assembly of 'targets' to be destroyed one by one; but as a living, intelligent entity capable of acting and reacting.

It is simply not true that war is solely a means to an end, nor do people necessarily fight in order to obtain this objective or that. In fact, the opposite is true: people very often take up one objective or another precisely in order that they may fight.

A world without war is not in the cards.

Assuming China does not become destabilized and continues to grow, it will no doubt develop a military program in proportion to its resources.

Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or 'the people,' constitute the great majority of those affected.

In the future as in the past, both Clausewitz and Sun Tzu will undoubtedly have a lot to offer.

'Never' is too much of a word. Nothing lasts forever.

The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself.

As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide.

I want to put any number of assorted 'ists' - such as relativists, deconstructionists, destructivists, postmodernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists and feminists - firmly in their place.

Sun Tzu does not need my praise. His work has lived for over two thousand years, and will surely live for another two thousand without any help from me.