War & Peace Quote by Karl Von Clausewitz

War runs on information the way a body runs on blood, and Clausewitz is pointing out that the blood is often contaminated. Coming from a Prussian soldier who watched Europe convulse under Napoleon, this isn’t a cozy reminder that “fog of war” exists; it’s a warning about command itself. The battlefield doesn’t just punish bad decisions. It punishes the very idea that decisions can be made cleanly, with reliable inputs.

The line works because it’s structured like a tightening vise: contradictory, then false, then uncertain. He’s not claiming most reports are lies; he’s saying most are unusable. Contradiction can be honest (two scouts see two different things). Falsehood can be accidental (misread signals, rumor, wishful interpretation). Uncertainty is the default setting because war is a living system: the enemy adapts, terrain misleads, exhausted messengers garble, and leadership hears what it wants to hear. Clausewitz is diagnosing not only the chaos “out there,” but the psychology “in here” - the staff room, the chain of command, the sovereign’s ear.

The subtext is a critique of armchair rationalism: the fantasy that war can be reduced to calculation if you just collect enough data. His target is the bureaucratic instinct to treat reports like ledger entries. In context, this is part of his broader argument that successful commanders cultivate judgment under pressure - a kind of trained skepticism paired with decisiveness. Not cynicism for its own sake, but disciplined doubt: the ability to act without the comfort of certainty, and to know that the map you’re handed is already outdated.