
Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Must We Go to War? (1937)
Context: The war method substitutes the doctrine of necessity for ethical ideals.... That is right which contributes to victory; that is wrong which magnifies the threat of defeat.
Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
“In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will.”
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Source: The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948) Moral of the Work, p. ix http://books.google.de/books?id=HzlT3t05OHoC&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q&f=false
We have no ethical relation to the clod, the molecule, or the scale sloughed off from our skin on the back of our hand, because the clod, the molecule, and the scale have no feeling, no soul, no anything rendering them capable of being affected by us [...] The fact that a thing is an organism, that it has organisation, has in itself no more ethical significance than the fact that it has symmetry, or redness, or weight.
Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 169
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix C: The System vs. The View of the Oxford Essayists, p.407
“War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.”
This is more commonly attributed to Georges Clemenceau, and the earliest published attribution to Pike is in 2008, without citation of sources.
Misattributed
p, 125
Evolution and Ethics (1893)
2006, Letter to Angela Merkel, 2006
Variant: Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
Source: The Art of War, Chapter IV · Disposition of the Army