Trivia / The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

• Referenced by...:
  • Sabaton based their fourth album on The Art of War, with each of thirteen tracks based on a chapter and often quoting the Lionel Giles translation (the audio is borrowed from the LibriVox audiobook).
  • Rihannsu: The Empty Chair has Leonard "Bones" McCoy disparage the book as repetitive and overrated compared to the works of Confucius.
  • Gustave Graves briefly quotes from the third chapter in Die Another Day to convince General Moon that he's really his son Colonel Tan-Sun Moon.
  • Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri features a secret project, The Hunter-Seeker Algorithm. Upon completing the project, the cutscene features a quote from this book about discerning the enemy's composition while remaining formless and concealing one's own forces.
  • Team Fortress 2: In Meet the Soldier, the Soldier quotes the book, followed by a bizarre ramble in which he claims Sun Tzu invented fighting, perfected his technique to become the best fighter in the world, used the money he made from winning professional fighting matches to buy two of every animal, herded them all onto a boat, and then beat them all up. Which is why a place with a bunch of different animals in it is now called a "Tzu".^note Unless it's a farm.
  • Destiny 2: In the "Alliance" cutscene of Season of the Risen, Empress Caiatl quotes the book, to Lord Saladin's surprise.
  • In Star Trek: Enterprise's "Affliction", Reed paraphrases Sun Tzu to a captive Klingon.
  • Saru quotes from chapter six of The Art of War in the season two finale of Star Trek: Discovery.
  • In Battleship, Alex brags that his plan to drift the battleship to fight the aliens was inspired by The Art of War. His Japanese counterpart Nagata immediately points out that he completely misunderstood the text.
  • In Ghost of Tsushima, when Jin reads a note left in a Mongol camp, Ryuzo asks how he learned to read Chinese. Jin responds that it was because his uncle made him learn it to be able to read The Art of War.
  • Technoblade had a tendency to do this a bunch, especially during the Potato War videos.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency sees Joseph quote The Art of War during his fight with Esidisi. Esidisi, an immortal Mayincatec Pillar Man, turns out to know it as well, having met the man himself in person.
  • VNV Nation's "Art of Conflict" directly quotes it.
  • Will Wood: The protagonist of "The Main Character" is a narcissist who harasses people who don't agree with him. At one point, he declares that "oh man, Sun Tzu would love" his actions — even though Tzu clearly wouldn't, hinting that the protagonist knew he wrote a book on war but didn't read past the cover.

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