In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.

But it's obvious since the beginning that wars make no sense. You kill people to tell them you want to stop killing them.

What you do in your model is not nearly as important as doing what you do the same way, each and every time.

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

No aprendas nada, y el próximo mundo será igual que éste, con las mismas limitaciones y pesos de plomo que superar

"You've lived through a lot of wars, I said.
"Yes."
Do they ever make more sense?
"No.

Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays. In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.

Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.

Wars are stupid and they can start stupidly.

Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum.

Wars are motivated by the need to seize the wealth of our neighbours, to wield power, to protect ourselves from real or imagined threats: in short they have, as we have seen, political, social, economic or demographic causes. There is no need to refer to Islam or the clash of civilizations to explain why the Afghans or the Iraqis resist the western military forces occupying their countries. Nor to speak of anti-Jewish sentiment or anti-Semitism to understand the reasons why the Palestinians are not overjoyed by the Israeli occupation of their lands.

We know already ample experience that it does not require much cleverness or much learning to be a governor, for there are a hundred round about us that scarcely know how to read.

La moraleja de todas las tragedias es la misma: que la Fortuna siempre ataca a los reinos prepotentes cuando menos lo esperan.