“Tis action moves the world....[in] the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it.”

“Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.”

“Remorse has no place in a warrior's mind... A war is like a game of chess, Nicholaa. Every battle is like a well-thought-out move on the board. Once it begins, there shouldn't be any emotion involved whatsoever.”

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”

“I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.”

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposedbeauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on toestablish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices whichmay oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as thehand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no otherprinciple of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, everysingle piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impressupon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily andharmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably,and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”