Martin Van Creveld Quotes

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

- Martin Van Creveld

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.

- Martin Van Creveld

Since 2006, when the Second Lebanon War killed perhaps 2,000 Lebanese, many of them civilians, and led to the destruction of an entire section of Beirut, the northern border has been absolutely quiet.

- Martin Van Creveld

The defense of the West Bank by Arab forces would be a truly suicidal enterprise. The late King Hussein understood these facts well. Until 1967, he was careful to keep most of his forces east of the Jordan River. When he momentarily forgot these realities in 1967, it took Israel just three days of fighting to remind him of them.

- Martin Van Creveld

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.

- Martin Van Creveld

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

- Martin Van Creveld

In Tunisia, the so-called Yasmin revolution has led to the installation of a relatively moderate Islamic government. Whether or not that means democracy will, however, only be put to the test if and when the time comes for another election, which the opposition may win.

- Martin Van Creveld

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.

- Martin Van Creveld

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. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see, there is simply no escape.

- Martin Van Creveld

The fate of Syria hangs in the balance, but it is entirely possible that the fall of the Assad regime will result in anarchy and cause Syria to turn into a second Afghanistan, a base for anti-Israel terrorism.

- Martin Van Creveld

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

- Martin Van Creveld

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

- Martin Van Creveld

If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself. If you behave like a coward, then you are going to become cowardly - it's only a question of time.

- Martin Van Creveld

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.

- Martin Van Creveld

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.

- Martin Van Creveld

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.

- Martin Van Creveld

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

- Martin Van Creveld

A world without war is not in the cards.

- Martin Van Creveld