Sadao Araki Quotes

I think the policy makers like the idea of being the boss. I mean people who like to boss other people around like to go into politics so they can become the boss.

No state is free from militarism, which is inherent in the very concept of the sovereign state. There are merely differences of degree in the militarism of states.

When political and business leaders tell the public - any public - 'We don't trust you to make the right decision' - they prejudice that electorate against the very proposals they want it to accept and undermine public confidence in themselves.

The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive.

The issue is whether the ultimate civil authority of the United States can tolerate actions in contempt of constitutional lines of authority. Any lessening of civil power over military power must inevitably lead away from democracy.

You can think of all the things a Congress or a legislature does, and then you kind of overshadow that with the fact that a few people are going to make those decisions.

Let me control personnel, and I will ultimately control policy.

As to mere power I have been for years in the daily exercise of more personal authority than any President habitually enjoys.

If you can't control these rumheads when you're their candidate, how the hell do you expect to control them if you become President?

I am polite and I usually always consult them [Congressional leaders]. I don't ask their permission. I just consult them.

If you are the executive, you're probably going to have more of an impact than if you're one of a hundred members of the Senate, certainly one of 435 members of the House.

AAP's Punjab Convener is not a rubber stamp.

But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.

To accept the principal that "all power proceeds from the barrel of a gun" is to accept a society which will be dominated by those with the biggest guns.

The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. ... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it.

It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.

Power always works from the corner office.

Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.

The orators and the despots have the least power in their cities ... since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.

To whom one reports is a unit of measure. It measures the exact distance between the player and the center of power. It is the closest we can get to a calibrated answer to the question 'How big am I?' More than the size of an executive's office or even his title, which no one remembers anyway, the fewer people between the player and a 'yes,' the more powerful he is.

By the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions.

We look a little bit disorderly, indecisive, leaderless. That's a real problem, and that's a problem that concerns me particularly on foreign affairs. The presidency, not just President Obama, but the presidency in recent years has lost some of the terrain that they used to dominate in the making of foreign policy. I think President Obama has to make a serious effort to regain it because he lost some of it himself.

If you have to tell someone they call the shots, they're not really calling the shots.

Let the soldier yield to the civilian.