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Necessity, which frequently exists only in the mind, is less often the mother of invention than of obstinacy, and the obstinacy of those three years exacted from France a penalty which continued to exert its effects over the years, especially in World War II, and which cannot be fully summed up even now.

— Bernard Brodie

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More quotes by Bernard Brodie

Soldiers usually are close students of tactics, but rarely are they students of strategy and practically never of war.

In wars throughout history, events have generally proved the pre-hostilities calculations of both sides, victor as well as loser, to have been seriously wrong.

We will be making a sufficient but necessary contribution if we simply jar the prevalent complacency on the doctrine of shoot-from-the-hip-and-empty-the-magazine.

Yet the only empirical data we have about how people conduct war and behave under its stresses is our experience with it in the past, however much we have to make adjustments for subsequent changes in conditions.

There is no other science where judgements are tested in blood and answered in the servitude of the defeated, where the acknowledged authority is the leader who has won or who instills confidence that he can win.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Bernard Brodie (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.