Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst.
Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results.
Carl von Clausewitz
― The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
Tolstoy’s meaning is not obscure. We are what we are, and live in a
given situation which has the characteristics – physical, psychological,
social – that it has; what we think, feel, do is conditioned by it,
including our capacity for conceiving possible alternatives, whether in
the present or future or past. Our imagination and ability to calculate,
our power of conceiving, let us say, what might have been, if the
past had, in this or that particular, been otherwise, soon reaches its
natural limits, limits created both by the weakness of our capacity for
calculating alternatives – ‘might have beens’ – and (we may add by a
logical extension of Tolstoy’s argument) even more by the fact that our
thoughts, the terms in which they occur, the symbols themselves, are
what they are, are themselves determined by the actual structure of our
world. Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that
our world possesses certain characteristics and not others: a world too
different is (empirically) not conceivable at all; some minds are more
imaginative than others, but all stop somewhere.”
― The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
LA ECONOMÍA ES LA CONTINUACIÓN DE LA GUERRA POR OTROS MEDIOS: (Simone Weil: No empecemos de nuevo la guerra de Troya (fragmentos)) Gillian Tett: "The key point to understand is that a shift in econ...
Before Trump's election
— Guillermo Ruiz Zapatero (@ruiz_zapatero) March 14, 2025
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