If this Republic is to achieve the greatness and duration its founders hoped to secure for it; if it is to continue to spread abroad over the earth the principles of its constitutions or the equity of its laws and the hope it extends to the betterment of the human race, then it must realize that this can only be done by possessing an ability and potentiality to be supreme over those nations whose ambitions and expansion are convergent.

To free a nation from error is to enlighten the individual, and only to the degree that the individual will be receptive of truth can a nation be free from that vanity which ends with national ruin.

No state is ever destroyed except through those avertible conditions that mankind dreads to contemplate. Yet nations prefer to perish rather than to master the single lesson taught by the washing away of those that have gone before them.

To speak of the end of all wars is like speaking of the end of all earthquakes.

Not only does the history of the political development of China resemble the history of the remainder of mankind, but [it] has, perhaps, within itself the solemn prophecy of the world’s political future.

As an individual can form no conception of personal death, so neither can nations.

When a country makes industrialism the end [purpose] it becomes a glutton among nations, vulgar, swinish, arrogant, whose kingdom lasts proportionately no longer than life remains to the swine among men.

Battles are no longer the spectacular heroics of the past. The army of to-day and to-morrow is a sombre, gigantic machine.

This Republic, drunk only with the vanity of its resources, will not differentiate between them and actual power.

The most promiscuous murderer in the world is an ignorant military officer.

It is a strange belief that standing armies are a menace to the world’s quietude, while it has only been due to the formation of permanent military forces that intervals of peace have been lengthened.

Instead of disarmament of nations becoming possible through increased civilization, it becomes more and more impossible as science increases the number of inventions.