Timidity is the root of prudence in the majority of men. - Carl von Clausewitz

casualty reports on either side are never accurate, seldom truthful, and in most cases deliberately falsified.

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.

It is the power of quickly forming a correct geometrical idea of any portion of country, and consequently of being able to find one’s place in it exactly at any time. This is plainly an act of the imagination. The perception no doubt is formed partly by means of the physical eye, partly by the mind, which fills up what is wanting with ideas derived from knowledge and experience, and out of the fragments visible to the physical eye forms a whole; but that this whole should present itself vividly to the reason, should become a picture, a mentally drawn map, that this picture should be fixed, that the details should never again separate themselves — all that can only be effected by the mental faculty which we call imagination.