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China

 (Chinese: 中国; : Zhōngguó), officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in. It is the world's second-most populous country with a population exceeding 1.4 billion. China spans the equivalent of five s and borders fourteen countries by land, tied with Russia as having the most of any country in the world. With an area of nearly 9.6 million square kilometres (3,700,000 sq mi), it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two special administrative regions (Hong Kong and ). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and largest is Shanghai.

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A

 * China, despite many imperfections in its economic and political system, has been the most rapidly growing nation of the past three decades. Chinese poverty until Mao Zedong’s death had nothing to do with Chinese culture; it was due to the disastrous way Mao organized the economy and conducted politics. In the 1950s, he promoted the Great Leap Forward, a drastic industrialization policy that led to mass starvation and famine. In the 1960s, he propagated the Cultural Revolution, which led to the mass persecution of intellectuals and educated people—anyone whose party loyalty might be doubted. This again led to terror and a huge waste of the society’s talent and resources. In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong’s death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry.
 * Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012)
 * A neighbor with one billion people equipped with nuclear bombs and has expanded its military outlays by double digits for 17 years in a row, and it is unclear as to what this is being used for. It is beginning to be a considerable threat.
 * Tarō Asō, as quoted in "Japan alarmed by Chinese 'threat'", BBC (22 December 2005)

B

 * China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the '30s. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
 * Steve Bannon, as quoted in "Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President" (January 2017), by Michael Wolff, NY Mag

 * The most striking cultural shifts in China over the last two decades or so has been the revival, both orchestrated and spontaneous, of tradition. The main trope for culture in the twentieth century, especially since 1949, has been anti-traditionalism. As far back as the in 1919, and before, whether it was the financial elite, the liberals, the Marxists, or anarchists they all agreed that China was poor and that one of the causes of that state of affairs was the backward traditional culture... '''We have witnessed a dramatic reevaluation of tradition in China, and also in other  countries with a Confucian heritage such as Korea. This part of the world has witnessed rapid growth over the last three decades that has sharply reduced poverty and the region has remained at peace. So when people look around and ask what do all these countries have in common, one answer is their Confucian heritage. So whereas the previous narrative was that Confucianism undermined modernization and economic growth, now many argue that it actually helps... Chinese thinkers gave much thought to how to select able and virtuous political leaders, which abilities matter and which virtues matter? Chinese pondered about, and experimented with, mechanisms for selecting leaders. And that tradition continues on today.
 * Daniel Bell, as quoted in "Chinese meritocracy and the limits of democracy" (17 December 2015), by, The Diplomat

 * If I were an Englishman, I should esteem the man who advised a war with China to be the greatest living enemy of my country. You would be beaten in the end, and perhaps a revolution in India would follow.
 * Napoleon Bonaparte, reported as being from an 1817 conversation in The Mind of Napoleon, ed. and trans. J. Christopher Herold (1955), p. 249. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

 * A 'superpower' is a country that wields enough military, political and economic might to convince nations in all parts of the world to do things they otherwise wouldn't. Pundits have rushed to label China the next superpower, and so have many ordinary Americans... Little of China's dramatic economic growth is finding its way into the pockets of Chinese consumers; the byproduct of an economy driven by massive state-owned enterprises rather than private industry.
 * Ian Bremmer, "These Are the 5 Reasons Why the U.S. Remains the World's Only Superpower: Why Washington can still claim global primacy in the 21st century" (28 May 2015), Time

 * The United States welcomes the emergence of a China that is peaceful and prosperous and that supports international institutions.
 * George W. Bush, speech at the White House (April 2006), as quoted in "Chinese President Arrival Ceremony" (20 April 2006), C-SPAN

C

 * There is a tendency in parts of Chinese thinking which says: "We need not only to be an important power in the region, we need to dominate the region!".
 * Ashton Carter, interview with Charlie Rose (February 2016)

 * There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world, broken only by the dull thud of Japanese bombs falling on Chinese cities, on Chinese Universities or near British and American ships. But then, China is a long way off, so why worry? The Chinese are fighting for what the founders of the American Constitution in their stately language called: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And they seem to be fighting very well. Many good judges think they are going to win. Anyhow, let’s wish them luck! Let’s give them a wave of encouragement – as your President did last week, when he gave notice about ending the commercial treaty. After all, the suffering Chinese are fighting our battle, the battle of democracy. They are defending the soil, the good earth, that has been theirs since the dawn of time against cruel and unprovoked aggression. Give them a cheer across the ocean – no one knows whose turn it may be next. If this habit of military dictatorships’ breaking into other people’s lands with bomb and shell and bullet, stealing the property and killing the proprietors, spreads too widely, we may none of us be able to think of summer holidays for quite a while.
 * Winston Churchill, A Hush Over Europe, 8 August 1939

 * The Chinese said of themselves several thousand years ago: "China is a sea that salts all the waters that flow into it." There's another Chinese saying about their country which is much more modern—it dates only from the fourth century. This is the saying: "The tail of China is large and will not be wagged." I like that one. The British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails. It is due to the working of these important forces that I have the honor to be addressing you at this moment.
 * Winston Churchill, address to a joint session of Congress, Washington, D.C. (17 January 1952); reported in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (1974), vol. 8, p. 8,326

 * The People's Republic of China is still a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist nation. So, you know, communism is still involved there. They haven't figured their way out of that particularly ideological box yet and that's their misfortune.
 * Tom Clancy, on Larry King Live Weekend (27 August 2000)

D

 * The emperor hold upon the Chinamen may be strong, but the Chinaman's hold upon himself is stronger... The Chinaman will not long be willing to wear the cast off shoes of the negro, and, if he refuses, there will be trouble again. The negro worked and took his pay in religion and the lash. The Chinaman is a different article and will want the cash. He may, like the negro, accept Christianity, but, unlike the negro, he will not care to pay for it in labor. He had the Golden Rule in substance five hundred years before the coming of Christ, and has notions of justice that are not to be confused by any... Chinese children are in American schools in San Francisco. None of our children are in Chinese schools, and probably never will be, though in some things they might well teach us valuable lessons. Contact with these yellow children of the Celestial Empire would convince us that the points of human difference, great as they, upon first sight, seem, are as nothing compared with the points of human agreement. Such contact would remove mountains of prejudice... The Chinese in themselves have first rate recommendations. They are industrious, docile, cleanly, frugal. They are dexterous of hand, patient in toil, marvelously gifted in the power of imitation, and have but few wants.
 * Frederick Douglass, Our Composite Nationality (7 December 1869), Boston, Massachusetts.

 * It is objected to the Chinaman that he is secretive and treacherous, and will not tell the truth when he thinks it for his interest to tell a lie. There may be truth in all this; it sounds very much like the account of man’s heart given in the creeds. If he will not tell the truth, except when it is for his interest to do so, let us make it for his interest to tell the truth. We can do it by applying to him the same principle of justice that we apply to ourselves. But I doubt if the Chinese are more untruthful than other people. At this point I have one certain test. Mankind are not held together by lies. Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported. Now a people who have confided in each other for five thousand years; who have extended their empire in all directions until it embraces one-fifth of the population of the globe; who hold important commercial relations with all nations; who are now entering into treaty stipulations with ourselves, and with all the great European powers, cannot be a nation of cheats and liars, but must have some respect for veracity. The very existence of China for so long a period, and her progress in civilization, are proofs of her truthfulness
 * Frederick Douglass, Our Composite Nationality (7 December 1869), Boston, Massachusetts.

 * No victory of arms, or tyranny of alien finance, can long suppress a nation so rich in resources and vitality. The invader will lose funds or patience before the loins of China will lose virility; within a century China will have absorbed and civilized her conquerors, and will have learned all the technique of what transiently bears the name of modern industry; roads and communications will give her unity, economy and thrift will give her funds, and a strong government will give her order and peace.
 * Will Durant and, , Book I, Our Oriental Heritage (1935) p. 823.

 * As India is par excellence the land of metaphysics and religion, China is by like preeminence the home of humanistic, or non-theological, philosophy.
 * Will Durant and, , Book I, Our Oriental Heritage (1935) 5. The Pre-Confucian Philosophers

 * The average Chinese is at once an animist, a Taoist, a Buddhist and a Confucianist.
 * Will Durant and, , Book I, Our Oriental Heritage (1935) (IV. RELIGION WITHOUT A CHURCH)

E

 * Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country.
 * He Keng, as quoted in

 * Most people with mental disorders in China never receive treatment. There is often a stigma attached to such ailments. Some think that people with psychiatric conditions are possessed by evil spirits. Many see mental disorders as a sign of weakness, and regard them as socially contagious: a relative of someone with a serious disorder may find it hard to marry. Families sometimes have their kin treated far away to hide the “shame” of their condition, or keep them hidden at home. Even many medical students worry that those working with psychiatric patients risk catching their disease, says Xu Ni of “It Gets Brighter”, a mental-health NGO in Beijing.
 * The Economist, “China wakes up to its mental-health problems”, (Jan 28th 2017).

F

 * They're not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial. They don't innovate. That's why they're stealing our intellectual property.
 * Carly Fiorina, as quoted in "Carly Fiorina Calls The Chinese Unimaginative Idea Thieves", by Lydia O'Connor, The Huffington Post (25 May 2015).

 * The Chinese are less a nation than a fusion of peoples united by a common culture, and the history of China is the record of an expanding culture.
 * , China: A Short Cultural History (1965).

 * [Chinese development has its roots in the 1949 Chinese Revolution, carried out by the Chinese Communist Party headed by Mao Zedong, whereby it liberated itself from the imperialist system. This allowed it to develop for decades under a planned economy largely free of constraints from outside forces, establishing a strong agricultural and industrial economic base. This was followed by a shift in the post-Maoist reform period to a hybrid system of more limited state planning along with a much greater reliance on market relations (and a vast expansion of debt and speculation) under conditions—the globalization of the world market—that were particularly fortuitous to its “catching up.” Through trade wars and other pressures aimed at destabilizing China’s position in the world market, the United States is already seeking to challenge the bases of China’s growth in world trade. China, therefore, stands not so much for the successes of but rather for its inherent limitations. The current Chinese model, moreover, carries within it many of the destructive tendencies of the system of capital accumulation. Ultimately, China’s future too depends on a return to the process of revolutionary transition, spurred by its own population.
 * John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism Has Failed—What Next? (February 01, 2019),

 * The problem for China is political. China is held together by money, not ideology. When there is an economic downturn and the money stops rolling in, not only will the banking system spasm, but the entire fabric of Chinese society will shudder. Loyalty in China is either bought or coerced. Without available money, only coercion remains. Business slowdowns can generally lead to instability because they lead to business failure and unemployment. In a country where poverty is endemic and unemployment widespread, the added pressure of an economic downturn will result in political instability.
 * George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 96, Doubleday

G

 * But democracies also took root because they generally outperformed autocracies in raising living standards. Markets do not always require democracy in order to function: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and China all developed successful economies under less than democratic conditions. The Cold War experience showed, though, that it is not easy to keep markets open and ideas constrained at the same time. And since markets proved more efficient than command economies in allocating resources and enhancing productivity, the resulting improvement in people s lives, in turn, strengthened democracies.
 * John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, pp. 265 (2006)

 * China’s capacity to meet new demands for agricultural products has been assessed by analysts inside and outside China since the 1980s. Economists have anticipated that market forces would induce China to import grains and other land-intensive crops, but Chinese officials (motivated by food security and other concerns) have long resisted these forces and sought to maintain self-sufficiency. However, officials are now adjusting their strategies to accommodate their country’s growing reliance on agricultural imports.
 * Fred Gale, James Hansen, and Michael Jewison, "China's Growing Demand for Agricultural Imports" (February 2015), United States Department of Agriculture.

 * Bart Simpson: What happened to you, China? You used to be cool.
 * Chinese delegate: Hey, China's still cool!
 *  (19 March 2000), The Simpsons, written by .

 * have no recourse to anything like an . The Communist Party decides if you’re guilty or innocent. The conviction rate stands in excess of 98 per cent. Torture and are commonplace. Xi has lately embarked on a vicious campaign of harassment and intimidation of  activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and feminists. Scores of human rights lawyers have been rounded up and jailed.
 * Terry Glavin, speaking about the . "China is no Friend to Canada" (2017), MacLeans

He accomplishes this through the aid of the priests, who receive his offerings of money, and light candles or incense at the shrine of the deity to be invoked. Buddhist priests are not popular with the Chinese, who make fun of their shaven heads, and doubt the sincerity of their convictions as well as the purity of their lives. "No meat nor wine may enter here" is a legend inscribed at the gate of most Buddhist temples, the ordinary diet as served in the refectory being strictly vegetarian. A tipsy priest, however, is not an altogether unheard-of combination, and has provided more than one eminent artist with a subject of an interesting picture.
 * The Chinese are emphatically not a religious people, though they are very superstitious. Belief in a God has come down from the remotest ages, but the old simple creed has been so overlaid by Buddhism as not to be discernible at the present day. Buddhism is now the dominant religion of China. It is closely bound up with the lives of the people, and is a never-failing refuge in sickness or worldly trouble. It is no longer the subtle doctrine which was originally presented to the people of India, but something much more clearly defined and appreciable by the plainest intellect. Buddha is the saviour of the people through righteousness alone, and Buddhist saints are popularly supposed to possess intercessory powers. Yet reverence is always wanting; and crowds will laugh and talk, and buy and sell sweetmeats, in a Buddhist temple, before the very eyes of the most sacred images. So long as divine intervention is not required, an ordinary Chinaman is content to neglect his divinities; but no sooner does sickness or financial trouble come upon the family, than he will hurry off to propitiate the gods.
 * Herbert Allen Giles, in The Civilization of China (1911), Chapter III : Religion and Superstition

 * Let us now pause to take stock of some of the results which have accrued from the operation and influence of Confucianism during such a long period, and over such swarming myriads of the human race. It is a commonplace in the present day to assert that the Chinese are hardworking, thrifty, and sober—the last-mentioned, by the way, in a land where drunkenness is not regarded as a crime. Shallow observers of the globe-trotter type, who have had their pockets picked by professional thieves in Hong-Kong, and even resident observers who have not much cultivated their powers of observation and comparison, will assert that honesty is a virtue denied to the Chinese; but those who have lived long in China and have more seriously devoted themselves to discover the truth, may one and all be said to be arrayed upon the other side. The amount of solid honesty to be met with in every class, except the professionally criminal class, is simply astonishing. That the word of the Chinese merchant is as good as his bond has long since become a household word, and so it is in other walks of life.
 * Herbert Allen Giles, in The Civilization of China (1911), Chapter III : Religion and Superstition

 * [N]early every political evil can be found on display in China: slavery, discrimination, religious persecution, xenophobia, tyranny, mass-political indoctrination, colonialism, cultural genocide, and so on. And yet, the outcry against these things in America and the West is a tiny fraction of what it was with regard to South Africa in the 1980s or Israel today. Why? Some of the political answers are pretty obvious — and have much merit. A few that come to mind: China is non-Western, and many of these sins are supposed to be unique to white Europeans; China is a victim (or “victim”) of colonialism, and so we shouldn’t judge it harshly; China is very powerful, and realpolitik dictates that we be diplomatic; and so on. But there’s another reason. As you may have noticed, I’ve become much more interested in evolutionary psychology of late, particularly the topic of coalitional instincts. The coalition instinct is the programming that helped us form strategic groups that advance our self-interest. We are a social species and cooperation is what helped us skyrocket to the top of the food chain.
 * Jonah Goldberg, "When Evil Becomes Inconvenient" (24 August 2018), National Review Online

H

 * So far, the world economy, particularly Australia and the United States, have benefited greatly from Chinese economic growth. This is likely to continue to be the case for some time... There is no real alternative to the United States as the global leader. China doesn't want the role. It would only divert its focus from its own development challenges. And to be frank, China would not be trusted by many countries, particularly in the, to be the global leader... Authoritarian state capitalism, seen today in China and Russia. While both countries have introduced elements of a market economy, private companies there operate side-by-side and at a significant disadvantage to state owned entities favored by government regulators. This mixed economy is not paralleled on the political side. What is emerging is an increasingly authoritarian political system with decreasing space for civil society, free media, and dissent. This model is attractive to authoritarian leaders around the world who see it as way to maintain power while still growing their economies.
 * Stephen Hadley, "America's Role In The World" (30 October 2014), Lowy Institute.

 * As a foreign literature it is studied also by the Coreans, the Japanese, and the Annamites; and it may therefore be quite appropriately called the Classic Literature of the Far East. The civilization of all these nations has been affected by its study, perhaps even in a higher degree than that of the nations of Europe has been by the literatures of Greece and Rome. Millions received from it, in the course of centuries, their mental training. The Chinese who created it have through it perpetuated their national character and imparted some of their idiosyncrasies of thought to their formerly illiterate neighbors.
 * Friedrich Hirth, Columbia University Professor of Chinese, "Chinese Literature" in Lectures on Literature (1911), page 67

 * I did feel that I was going back to a place that I had never been.
 * Maxine Hong Kingston on visiting China the first time, in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (1998)

 * The Chinese are industrious, courageous, honest, and intelligent. They created the splendid ancient Chinese civilization, and today, they're firmly committed to the path of peaceful development and are making continuous progress in the modernization drive by carrying out the reform and opening up program.
 * Jintao Hu, "President Bush and President Hu of People's Republic of China Participate in Arrival Ceremony " (20 April 2006), by J. Hu, Washington, D.C.: White House.

 * The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will definitely be accompanied by the thriving of Chinese culture.
 * Jintao Hu, address to the 17th Chinese Communist Party Congress (2008)

 * When China sends its students to the United States, especially when it sends central bankers and planners to the United States to study (and be recruited), they are told by the U.S. “Do as we say, not as we have done.” The United States is not telling China... how to get rich in the way that it did, by protective tariffs, by creating its own money and by making other countries dependent on it. The United States does not want you to be independent and self-reliant. The United States wants China to let itself become dependent on U.S. finance in order to invest in its own industry... The neoliberal plan is not to make you independent, and not to help you grow except to the extent that your growth will be paid to US investors or used to finance U.S. military spending around the world to encircle you and trying to destabilize you in Sichuan to try to pry China apart.  Look at what the United States has done in Russia, and at what the International Monetary Fund in Europe has done to Greece, Latvia and the Baltic states. It is a dress rehearsal for what U.S. diplomacy would like to do to you, if it can convince you to follow the neoliberal US economic policy of financialization and privatization.  De-dollarization is the alternative to privatization and financialization.
 * Michael Hudson, Note to China, (14 January 2020)

 * The U.S.-China confrontation is not simply a national rivalry, but a conflict of economic and social systems.... From today’s U.S. vantage point... China and Russia are existential threats to the global expansion of financialized rentier wealth. Today’s Cold War 2.0 aims to deter China and potentially other counties from socializing their financial systems, land and natural resources, and keeping infrastructure utilities public to prevent their being monopolized in private hands to siphon off economic rents at the expense of productive investment in economic growth. The United States hoped that China might be as gullible as the Soviet Union and adopt neoliberal policy permitting its wealth to be privatized and turned into rent-extracting privileges, to be sold off to Americans.
 * Michael Hudson, America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism, (14 April 2021)

 * China, like Russia, has been reducing its dollar holdings as much as possible, just keeping enough to prevent the currency from being destabilized by the dollar inflows. China, Russia are buying gold instead of U.S. dollars as much as possible. China is trying to escape from buying Treasury securities. Why would any government want to buy Treasury securities yielding 0.1% when the dollars coming into China are trying to make loans or buying countries, making 15% profit or interest a year? Nobody would want that situation to continue. China doesn’t want it to continue. As long as it [China] is part of an international economy that is dollarized, it [China] is forced to take a loss, a sacrifice, year after year, subsidizing the U.S. economy. The only way that it can avoid that is to isolate itself from the U.S. dollar. No country until this time since 1945 has ever had the critical mass to be able to do it. That is the objective, the stated objective of Russia, China and their allies. Of course, they don’t want to buy treasury bills. That doesn’t mean that, yes, they found a wonderful investment making 0.1% a year and subsidizing the United States. That is not what China or any other country wants.
 * Michael Hudson, China – a Sub-Imperial Ally of the West? (3 April 2022)

I

 * China seems to have been very much similar to the West, both in the production of new religious movements and in attracting to them figures from the political left who were officially promoting the struggle against “superstition.” Reconstructions of “Chinese traditional culture” as “non-religious,” and of the rich Chinese religious pluralism as mere “folk religion” should be viewed as propaganda rather than history.
 * Massimo Introvigne, "New Religious Movements in China: They Were Always There", Bitter Winter (June 27, 2020)

J

 * China’s battle against poverty has benefited the largest number of people in human history. To sustain poverty reduction gains, China will focus more on achieving endogenous development in areas that have been lifted out of poverty and introduce vigorous measures to support rural revitalization. Our goal is to achieve common prosperity and high-quality development including through the rural revitalization strategy with a focus in five key areas: industry development, human capital, culture, ecological environment and local governance.”
 * Ma Jiantang as quoted in  [https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience World Bank Press Release No. 2022/072/EAP, Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience, April 1, 2022

K

 * The Chinese have always struck me as pretty cautious, even crafty, in managing their rise. It's true that they’re a lot more aggressive since 2009, but I don't see them suddenly becoming reckless. I always found that factoid that the PRC spends more on internal than external security to be indicative that CCP is, in fact, very insecure at the top. It's got to have an ideology with foreign enemies, otherwise the Chinese people might see the real enemy, the CCP's corruption, rejection of democracy and unwillingness to admit the horrors of.
 * , as quoted in "Does China ADIZ take focus off 'real enemy'?: To many experts, Beijing's foreign policy is a byproduct of domestic issues" (1 December 2013), by Max Fisher, The Washington Post.

 * The collapse of U.S. influence over Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom’s new alliances with China and Iran are painful emblems of the abject failure of the Neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony with aggressive projections of military power. China has displaced the American Empire by deftly projecting, instead, economic power. Over the past decade, our country has spent trillions bombing roads, ports, bridges, and airports. China spent the equivalent building the same across the developing world.
 * Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr., from his post on Facebook (4 April 2023)

 * Contemporaneous with the age of Greek culture, while Rome was yet an infant city and the rest of Europe in a condition of barbarism, the Chinese were a civilised race. Many years before the Christian era they had evolved under the name of Taoism, a set of principles and a mystic teaching based on the writings of Laotzu, which formed a not altogether despicable substitute for a religion, while in Confucianism they enjoyed a sound philosophy. Under these influences the arts of peace gradually achieved the first place among the national ideas. The application of principles of reason to the relationships of daily life, the adjustment of differences by discussion, and the cultivation of respect for age and learning, became cardinal principles.
 * Percy Howard Kent,

 * China believes it is the center of the universe. Look at its flag; one big star surrounded by satellite stars. Arrogant!
 * Nguyen Khanh, as quoted in "A Bag of Earth, A Promise To Keep" (28 April 2005), Viet Weekly, by Mike Nally

 * I hear from higher up that China seems to be succeeding on many fronts – engineering, commerce, hotels, agriculture - everything. In many ways, don’t we need to take them as a model example for us?
 * Kim Jong-un as recalled by by household chef Kenji Fujimoto "The thinking behind Kim Jong Un's 'madness'"

 * China too faces a world order that is new to it. For 2,000 years, the Chinese Empire had united its world under a single imperial rule. To be sure, that rule had faltered at times. Wars occurred in China no less frequently than they did in Europe. But since they generally took place among contenders for the imperial authority, they were more in the nature of civil rather than international wars, and, sooner or later, invariably led to the emergence of some new central power. Before the nineteenth century, China never had a neighbor capable of contesting its pre-eminence and never imagined that such a state could arise. Conquerors from abroad overthrew Chinese dynasties, only to be absorbed into Chinese culture to such an extent that they continued the traditions of the Middle Kingdom. The notion of the sovereign equality of states did not exist in China; outsiders were considered barbarians and were relegated to a tributary relationship—that was how the first British envoy to Beijing was received in the eighteenth century. China disdained sending ambassadors abroad but was not above using distant barbarians to overcome the ones nearby. Yet this was a strategy for emergencies, not a day-to-day operational system like the European balance of power, and it failed to produce the sort of permanent diplomatic establishment characteristic of Europe. After China became a humiliated subject of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, it re-emerged only recently—since the Second World War—into a multipolar world unprecedented in its history.
 * Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (1994)

 * Back in about 1753 it took a letter three days to go from New York City to Washington, and today you can go from here to China in less time than that... Man's scientific genius has been amazing.
 * Martin Luther King, Jr., Rediscovering Lost Values, Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954).

 * If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic F irst Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there.
 * Martin Luther King, Jr., I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968).'

M

 * To understand the changes which now appear upon the Chinese mainland, one must understand the changes in Chinese character and culture over the past 50 years. China, up to 50 years ago, was completely non-homogenous, being compartmented into groups divided against each other. The war-making tendency was almost non-existent, as they still followed the tenets of the Confucian ideal of pacifist culture. At the turn of the century, under the regime of Chang Tso Lin, efforts toward greater homogeneity produced the start of a nationalist urge. This was further and more successfully developed under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, but has been brought to its greatest fruition under the present regime to the point that it has now taken on the character of a united nationalism of increasingly dominant, aggressive tendencies. Through these past 50 years the Chinese people have thus become militarized in their concepts and in their ideals. They now constitute excellent soldiers, with competent staffs and commanders. This has produced a new and dominant power in Asia, which, for its own purposes, is allied with Soviet Russia but which in its own concepts and methods has become aggressively imperialistic, with a lust for expansion and increased power normal to this type of imperialism. There is little of the ideological concept either one way or another in the Chinese make-up. The standard of living is so low and the capital accumulation has been so thoroughly dissipated by war that the masses are desperate and eager to follow any leadership which seems to promise the alleviation of local stringencies. I have from the beginning believed that the Chinese Communists' support of the North Koreans was the dominant one. Their interests are, at present, parallel with those of the Soviet. But I believe that the aggressiveness recently displayed not only in Korea but also in Indo-China and Tibet and pointing potentially toward the South reflects predominantly the same lust for the expansion of power which has animated every would-be conqueror since the beginning of time.
 * Douglas MacArthur, 1953 Farewell Speech
 * By contrast, classical China produced many great generals, fought many wars and conquered many peoples but did not elevate military values above civilian. (It helped, perhaps, that the scholars rather than the military wrote the histories.) Fighting was not held up as something admirable but rather as the result of a breakdown in order and propriety. There is no equivalent of the Iliad in Chinese literature and the heroes held up for the young to emulate were the great bureaucrats and wise rulers who maintained the peace. Early on Chinese thinkers such as Confucius and the great strategist Sunzi (also known in the transliteration Sun Tzu) stressed that the state’s authority rested on its virtue as well as on its ability to use force. And for Sunzi, the greatest general was the one who could win a war, through manoeuvre or trickery, without fighting a battle. Prestige in Chinese society came rather from being a scholar, poet or painter; and from the Tang dynasty onwards the examination system to enter the imperial civil service was the favoured path for fame and prestige. Successful generals were sometimes awarded a scholar’s rank and gown as a mark of particular favour where many European societies would have given military decorations to meritorious civilians. Societies’ values can change over time, of course. Swedish soldiers were once the terror of Europe when now we associate Sweden with the Nobel Peace Prize or international mediation.
 * Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020)

O

 * When it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead.
 * Barack Obama, State of the Union address (12 January 2016).

 * China remains the world's largest manufacturer, with four trillion dollars in foreign-exchange reserves, a sum equivalent to the world’s fourth-largest economy... Last spring, China abolished registered-capital and other requirements for new companies, and in November it allowed foreign investors to trade shares directly on the Shanghai stock market for the first time... The risks to China's economy have rarely been more visible. The workforce is aging more quickly than in other countries, because of the one-child policy, and businesses are borrowing money more rapidly than they are earning it... The growth of demand for energy and raw materials has slowed, more houses and malls are empty, and nervous Chinese savers are sending money overseas, to protect it in the event of a crisis... To maintain economic growth, China is straining to promote innovation... After China had spent years investing in science and technology, the share of its economy devoted to research and development surpassed Europe's... The era of Xi Jinping has defied the assumption that China's fitful opening to the world is too critical and productive to stall.
 * Evan Osnos, "Born Red: How Xi Jinping, an unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao." (6 April 2015), The New Yorker.

P

 * China as a society, a government, an economy and a culture is quite difficult for us to comprehend today. The changes are so rapid in cities like Beijing and Shanghai and the culture remarkably fluid... China is increasingly influential in the world and more and more people have hopes that China will be a leader... China has ended up playing a critical role in geopolitics more quickly than anybody had anticipated.
 * , "Chinese meritocracy and the limits of democracy" (17 December 2015), The Diplomat

 * The Chinese are rejecting western values and multiparty democracy... It seems very incongruous to be, on the one hand, so committed to fostering more competition and market-driven flexibility in the economy and, on the other hand, to be seeking more control in the political sphere, the media, and the Internet.
 * Henry Paulson, Dealing with China, as quoted in "Born Red: How Xi Jinping, an unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao." (6 April 2015), by Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

R

 * We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of un-warlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.
 * Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (10 April 1899), Chicago, Illinois

 * [W]hat is nationalism? And what nationalism is actually Western invention. Imperial China had no nationalism. Where do they get their ideas of nationalism? Well, they got their ideas of nationalism from the Japanese, which emerged as a national state in the 19. Well, where did the Japanese get their ideas about nationalism, which were then translated into Chinese? They got it from the Germans. So what they imported was a 19th-century version of social Darwinism in which race is of the fundamental basis of nationality and there are very – when you hear Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders talking about cultural pollution, when you talk about the natural affinity of all Chinese people wherever they are, you begin to worry that there is this submerged, and sometimes not even so, some racialist component.
 * Stephen Rosen, interview with Bill Kristol (2016), transcript

 * If you want to know what people are worried about look at what they spend their money on. If you’re afraid of burglars you buy a burglar alarm. What are the Chinese spending their money on? We’re told from Chinese figures they’re spending on the People’s Armed Police, the internal security force is about as big as they’re spending on the regular military. This whole great firewall of Chinese, this whole massive effort to control the internet, this effort to use modern information technology not to disseminate information, empowering individuals, but to make people think what you want them to think and to monitor their behavior so that you can isolate and suppress them. That’s because this is a regime which is fundamentally afraid of its own people. And it’s fundamentally hostile to them.
 * Stephen Rosen, interview with Bill Kristol (30 November 2018), transcript
 * The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible.
 * Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XII: The Chinese Character.
 * The Chinese are a great nation, incapable of permanent suppression by foreigners. They will not consent to adopt our vices in order to acquire military strength; but they are willing to adopt our virtues in order to advance in wisdom. I think they are the only people in the world who quite genuinely believe that wisdom is more precious than rubies. That is why the West regards them as uncivilized.
 * Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XIII: Higher education in China.

S

 * Some observers have already proclaimed that China will rule the world, This prospective is profoundly overstated and incorrect in my view... China has a long way to go before it becomes, if it ever becomes a true, and it will never rule the world.
 * , China Goes Global: The Partial Power (2013), New York: Oxford University Press

 * China is, in essence, a very narrow-minded, self-interested, realist state, seeking only to maximize its own national interests and power. It cares little for global governance and enforcing global standards of behavior, except its much-vaunted doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of countries. Its economic policies are mercantilist and its diplomacy is passive. China is also a lonely strategic power, with no allies and experiencing distrust and strained relationships with much of the world.
 * , China Goes Global: The Partial Power (2013), New York: Oxford University Press, p. 310

 * China is a very contradictory country... China punches way below its weight, it is not, it is free-riding... It is not contributing... China is a lonely power... Who wants to seek political asylum in China? Nobody.
 * , "David Shambaugh - China Goes Global: The Partial Power" (April 2013), USC U.S.-China Institute, YouTube
 * The subsequent evolution of the Chinese state is one where bureaucratic recruitment and rule became ever more routinized, and this occurred at the expense of hereditary lineages. In western Europe, after the fall of Rome rulers pursued a policy of giving grants of land in exchange for military service. These grants tended to be one-way transactions. Over time this led to the creation of a category of members of society with substantial autonomy. The presence of this group would play a prominent role in the early development of medieval assemblies. In China things pushed in the opposite direction. With the perfection of an imperial examination system during the Tang and Song dynasties, Chinese rulers had at their disposal a means of bureaucratic recruitment that did not depend on societal networks outside of their control. Being a member of the elite now meant being part of the state itself.
 * David Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (2020), pp. 14-15

 * The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit...they are just a heap of loose sand...Other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat.
 * Sun Yat-sen, China as a Heap of Loose Sand (1924)

 * China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable.
 * Sun Yat-sen, Capital and the State (1924)

 * This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before, it’s also striking that this is the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.
 * Kiron Skinner, speaking about China, as quoted in "The worst justification for Trump’s battle with China? The ‘clash of civilizations’" (29 April 2019) Washington Post

T

 * One of the greatest untold secrets of history is that the 'modern world' in which we live is a unique synthesis of Chinese and Western ingredients. Possibly more than half of the basic inventions and discoveries upon which the 'modern world' rests come from China. And yet few people know this. Why? The Chinese themselves are as ignorant of this fact as Westerners. From the seventeenth century onwards, the Chinese became increasingly dazzled by European technological expertise, having experienced a period of amnesia regarding their own achievements. When the Chinese were shown a mechanical clock by Jesuit missionaries, they were awestruck. They had forgotten that it was they who had invented mechanical clocks in the first place!
 * - The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery and Invention (1986).

 * Arise! All those who don't want to be slaves! Let our flesh and blood forge our new Great Wall! As the Chinese nation has arrived at its most perilous time, every person is forced to expel their very last roar.
 * ,  (1934).

 * [A]t a time when the crisis of the Coronavirus pandemic is developing rapidly. [...] The currently appears  “successful” in its response, but in the first weeks that the new coronavirus appeared, the government offered the denialism typical of restorationist capitalist bureaucracy, ignoring the warnings that could have reduced the number of deaths (including that of Li Wenliang, a doctor who warned about the epidemic and was consequently accused by the authorities of “spreading rumors” before he died from COVID-19). China is the most extreme example of authoritarianism around the world, with its tight bureaucratic control that prevents vital news from leaving  and other affected areas.
 * Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International, Coronavirus and the Healthcare Crisis: Our Lives Are Worth More than Their Profits! (March 14, 2020), Left Voice.

 * I know the Chinese. I've made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind.
 * Donald Trump, as quoted in "Playing the Chinese Trump Card" (24 August 2015), Forbes (August 2015).

 * The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
 * Donald Trump, Twitter (6 November 2012)
 * We have a 500 billion dollar deficit, trade deficit with China. We're going to turn it around and we have the cards, don't forget, we're like the piggy bank that's being robbed. We have the cards, we have a lot of power with China. When China doesn't want to fix the problem in North Korea we say "Sorry folks, you've got to fix the problem." Because we can't continue to allow China to rape our country, and that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world.
 * Donald Trump, as quoted in "China accused of trade 'rape' by Donald Trump" (2 May 2016) BBC

 * No California gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the east. Only the scum of the population do it; they and their children. They, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.
 * Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872).

 * A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do.
 * Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872), p. 169.

 * I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature... I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him.
 * Mark Twain, as quoted in Mark Twain and the Three Rs: Race, Religion, Revolution and Related Matters (1973), by Maxwell Geismar, Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, p. 98.

V

 * The Chinese have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people.
 * J.D. Vance, FIRE GRANTS AND SAFETY ACT--Continued (April 19, 2023)

W

 * The United States and other democratic nations do so much business with China that there is a tendency to turn a blind eye towards the Communist Party's abysmal human rights record. The Chinese Communist Party's strategy of liberalizing its national economy while harshly rejecting democracy has become the model for modern dictatorships. Hu Jintao and his party control all media in China, between 250,000 and 300,000 Chinese citizens, including political dissidents, are incarcerated in "reeducation-through-labor" camps and the conviction rate in normal criminal trials in 99.7 percent. Less than 5 percent of trials include witnesses. Amnesty International has reported that children have been bussed to public executions as field trips.
 * David Wallechinsky, Tyrants: The World's 20 Worst Living Dictators (2006), p. 2
 * The world must understand that millions of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang are being sent to concentration camps and forced into labor.
 * Michael Waltz Statement Regarding U.S. Declaration of China's Actions Against Uyghurs As Genocide January 19, 2021

 * There is a strange symmetry to China’s twentieth century, and much of it is linked to the ideological Cold War. At the beginning of the century, China’s republican revolution was overtaken by Communism and conflict. And at the end of the century, Communism was overtaken by money and markets. In between lay a terrible time of destruction and reconstruction, of enthusiasm and cynicism, and of almost never-ending rivers of blood. What marks these Chinese revolutions most of all is their bloodthirst: according to a recent estimate, seventy-seven million Chinese died unnatural deaths as a result of warfare or political mass-murder between the 1920s and the 1980s, and the vast majority of them were killed by other Chinese.
 * Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A Global History (2017)
 * Chinese is the easiest language when it is learned at ease, dwelling on its spirit rather than on the individual expression. But for inquisitive questioners, this language provides vain pitfalls.
 * Richard Wilhelm, Die Seele Chinas. Berlin, Hobbing, 1926

 * Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty.
 * The World Bank Press Release No. 2022/072/EAP, Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience,  April 1, 2022

 * One of the things we're trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it's going to take a whole-of-society response by us.
 * Christopher A. Wray in February 13, 2018 CNN

X

 * When our thousands of Chinese students abroad return home, you will see how China will transform itself.
 * Deng Xiaoping, as quoted in Forbes, Vol. 176, Editions 7-13 (2005), p. 79

Z

 * People who try to commit suicide — don't attempt to save them! . . . China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people.
 * Attributed to Mao Zedong by Wang Li, “历史将宣告我无罪” (History Will Pronounce Me Innocent), manuscript, Beijing, 1993, p. 7. This source is a privately printed collection of letters and documents concerning Wang Li's expulsion from the CCP. Cited in  (2006) by and.

 * This experience and the historical experiences gained by the Party since its founding can be summarized as follows: Our Party must always represent the requirements for developing China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. These are the inexorable requirements for maintaining and developing socialism, and the logical conclusion our Party has reached through hard exploration and great praxis.
 * Jiang Zemin, work report at the Communist Party of China Congress (8 November 2002), as quoted in Selected Works of Jiang Zemin, Eng. ed., FLP, Beijing, 2013, Vol. III, p. 519.

 * A review of our party's seventy-plus-year history elicits an important conclusion. Our party earned the people's support during the historical periods of revolution, construction and reform because it always represented the requirements for developing China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The party also earned popular support because it fought tirelessly to realize the fundamental interests of the country and the people by formulating a correct line, principles and policies. Today, humanity once again stands at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. How our party can better effectuate the Three Represents under the new historical conditions is a major issue all Party comrades, especially high-ranking party cadres, must consider deeply... The Communist Party of China should represent the development trends of advanced productive forces, the orientations of an advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people of China.
 * Jiang Zemin, "The Three Represents" (25 February 2000).

 * We want to learn from the west about science and technology and how to manage the economy, but this must be combined with specific conditions here. That's how we have made great progress in the last twenty years.
 * Jiang Zemin, as quoted in "Jiang Zemin Talks With Wallace" CBS news (August 2000)

 * In front of a lot of princeling friends, I've said that, if the Communist Party can't take sufficient political reform in five or ten years, it could miss the chance entirely. As scholars, we always say it's better to have reform than revolution, but in Chinese history this cycle repeats itself. Mao said we have to get rid of the cycle, but right now we’re still in it. This is very worrying.
 * , as quoted in "Born Red: How Xi Jinping, an unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao." (6 April 2015), by Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

 * United Nations

title: China


text:
Freddie Mercury

Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara; 5 September 1946 – 24 November 1991) was a British singer, songwriter, record producer, and lead vocalist of the rock band Queen. Regarded as one of the greatest singers in the history of rock music, he was known for his flamboyant stage persona and four-octave vocal range. Mercury defied the conventions of a rock frontman, with his highly theatrical style influencing the artistic direction of Queen. He died of bronchopneumonia induced by HIV (AIDS), only a day after going public with an announcement of his illness.
 * See also:
 * Queen

Quotes

 *  It all began with the three wise men, followed a star took them to Bethelehem, and made it heard throughout the land — born was the leader of man. All going down to see the Lord Jesus.
 * "Jesus" on Queen (1973).

 * We’re confident people will take to us, because although the camp image has already been established by people like Bowie and Bolan we are taking it to another level. The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic. Glamour is part of us and we want to be dandy. We want to shock and be outrageous instantly.
 * On Queen, in "Standing Up For Queen" (28 July 1973).

 * Gay as a daffodil.
 * On himself, as quoted in Interview by Julie Webb for New Musical Express (12 March 1974); he is often reported to have said "I'm as gay as a daffodil, my dear!" but it does not appear in that form in the article.

 * I hate pockets in trousers … By the way, I do not wear a hose. My hose is my own. No coke bottle, nothing stuffed down there.
 * As quoted in NME (2 November 1974).

 * Jimi Hendrix is very important. He's my idol. He sort of epitomizes, from his presentation on stage, the whole works of a rock star. There's no way you can compare him. You either have the magic or you don't. There's no way you can work up to it. There's nobody who can take his place.
 * As quoted in "Queen's Freddie Mercury Shopping For An Image In London" by Scott Cohen in Circus Magazine (April 1975).

 * Liza, in terms of sheer talent, just oozes with it. She has sheer energy and stamina, which she gets across the stage, and the way she delivers herself to the public is a good influence. There is a lot to learn from her
 * As quoted in "Queen's Freddie Mercury Shopping For An Image In London" by Scott Cohen in Circus Magazine (April 1975).

 * Led Zeppelin is the greatest. Robert Plant is one of the most original vocalists of our time. As a rock band they deserve the kind of success they're getting.
 * As quoted in "Queen's Freddie Mercury Shopping For An Image In London" by Scott Cohen in Circus Magazine (April 1975).

 * All my lovers asked me why they couldn't replace Mary, but it's simply impossible. The only friend I've got is Mary and I don't want anybody else. To me, she was my common-law wife. To me, it was a marriage. We believe in each other, that's enough for me.
 * On Mary Austin, a long time companion, and the inheritor of most of his estate, as quoted in "For A Song : The Mercury that's rising in rock is Freddie the satiny seductor of Queen" by Fred Hauptfuhrer, in People magazine (5 December 1977)

 * I just like having fun. It's a very good release, rock music, but you know you say that I am a different person on stage and that same thing could be said of anyone going out to do his job. It's my work, and I'm very serious about it, getting it right - when we began, we approached it the way we did because we were not prepared to be out-of-work musicians, ever. We said either take it on as a serious commodity or don't do it at all.
 * "The Man Who Would Be Queen" in Melody Maker (2 May 1981).

 * I like people to go away from a Queen show feeling fully entertained, having had a good time. I think Queen songs are pure escapism, like going to see a good film - after that, they can go away and say that was great, and go back to their problems. I don't want to change the world with our music. There are no hidden messages in our songs, except for some of Brian's.
 * "The Man Who Would Be Queen" in Melody Maker (2 May 1981).

 * Listen, if you guys wanna move around and shift your asses a little, it's okay. It's okay by us, right? You can take all your clothes off if you like too, doesn't matter... Fuck off! [laughs]
 * During a concert in Montreal, Canada, (24 or 25 November 1981), first released as videotape We Will Rock You (1984), and later on DVD as Queen Rock Montreal (2007).

 * Hello everybody! Hey hey hey! Okay! Do you know it's not... it's not very often that we do shows in daylight. And I fucking wish we'd done before, I can see you all now. And there's some beauties here tonight, I can tell you!
 * Live at Milton Keynes Bowl (5 June 1982).

 * I would have loved to have been on the Band Aid record but I only heard about it when I was in Germany. I don’t know if they would have had me on the record anyway, because I’m a bit old. I’m just an old slag who gets up every morning, scratches his head and wonders what he wants to fuck.
 * As quoted in "Blame it on Rio" by Robin Smith, in Record Mirror (26 January 1985).

 * I'm possessed by love — but isn't everybody? Most of my songs are love ballads and things to do with sadness and torture and pain. In terms of love, you're not in control and I hate that feeling. I seem to write a lot of sad songs because I'm a very tragic person. But there's always an element of humour at the end.
 * As quoted in "I am the Champion" by Nick Ferrari in The Sun (19 July 1985).

 * Montserrat Caballé is sensational. She has that same kind of emotion as Aretha Franklin. The way she delivers a song is so very natural. It's a very different gift.
 * "I am the Champion" by Nick Ferrari in The Sun (19 July 1985).

 * You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man. And that is the most bitter type of loneliness, success has brought me world idolisation and millions of pounds. But it's prevented me from having the one thing we all need: A loving, ongoing relationship.
 * As quoted in "Rock On Freddie" (1985).

 * Can you imagine how terrible it is when you've got everything and you're still desperately lonely? That is awful beyond words. I'm so powerful on stage that I seem to have created a monster. When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man.
 * As quoted in "Rock On Freddie" (1985).
 * I can’t win. Love is Russian roulette for me. No one loves the real me inside. they're all in love with my fame, my stardom. I fall in love far too quickly and end up getting hurt all the time. I've got scars all over. But I can't help myself because basically I'm a softie I have this hard, macho shell — which I project on stage but there's a much softer side. too, which melts like butter.
 * "Rock On Freddie" (1985).

 * Our love affair ended in tears but a deep bond grew out of it, and that's something nobody can take away from us. It's unreachable … All my lovers ask me why they can't replace her, but it's simply impossible. I don't feel jealous of her lovers because. of course, she has a life to lead, and so do I. Basically, I try to make sure she's happy with whoever she's with and she tries to do the same for me. We look after each other and that's a wonderful form of love. I might have all the problems in the world, but I have Mary and that gets me through.
 * On his relationship with Mary Austin, as quoted in "Rock On Freddie" (1985).

 * This next song is only dedicated to beautiful people here tonight. That means all of you. Thank you for coming along... and making this a great occasion.
 * Source: Live Aid, 1985/07/13 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A22oy8dFjqc?t=12m5s

 * You know something? There's been a lot of rumors lately about a certain band called Queen. The rumors are that... The rumors are that we're gonna split up. What do you think? [audience replies "No!"] [Pointing to his posterior] They're talking from here! [audience replies "Yes"!] My apologies, but I say what I want. You know what I mean? So forget those rumors. We’re gonna stay together until we fucking well die, I’m sure of it. I keep — I must tell you — I keep wanting to leave, but they won’t let me. Also, I suppose we’re not... We're not bad for four aging queens, are we? Really, what do you think?
 * "Queen: Live at Wembley" (1986), shortly before performing "Who Wants To Live Forever."

 * Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has come now for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth and I hope that everyone will join with my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease. My privacy has always been very special to me and I am famous for my lack of interviews. Please understand this policy will continue.
 * Statement to the press (23 November 1991), the day before his death, as quoted at The Biography Channel.

Quotes about Mercury

 * I lost somebody who I thought was my eternal love … When he died I felt we'd had a marriage. We'd lived our vows. We'd done it for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. You could never have let go of Freddie unless he died — and even then it was difficult.
 * Mary Austin, his longtime companion in "The Ex-Lover Of Freddie Mercury Mary Austin Shares Her Memories Of The Late Queen Singer Inside His Home" in OK! (17 March 2000).

 * The difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was that he was selling the voice.
 * Montserrat Caballé in Freddie Mercury : A Kind of Magic (2006) directed by Matthew Cain.

 * Freddie Mercury was a huge source of inspiration to me as a child. I religiously attended Queen's concerts year after year. This is a sad day.
 * George Michael, after Freddie's death.

 * I haven't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things. For example, when we're backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowds begins, it doesn't affect me the way in which it did for Freddy [sic] Mercury who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd, which is something I totally admire and envy.
 * Kurt Cobain, in his suicide note (5 or 6 April 1994).

 * When we lost Freddie, we not only lost a great personality, a man with a great sense of humour, a true showman, but we lost probably the best. The best virtuoso rock 'n' roll singer of all time. He could sing anything in any style. He could change his style from line to line and, God, that's an art. And he was brilliant at it.
 * Roger Daltrey as quoted in "The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert" by Jim O’Donnell (20 April 1992).

 * My tribute really was "The Show Must Go On." There's a lot in there. I remember writing this line — "my soul is painted like the wings of butterflies" — and I brought it to him one morning, a little worried about what he would think of it. I said, "Do you think that's okay? Can you sing that?" And he went, "Darling, I can sing that and I will give it my all." Because he knew what it was all about and it didn't need to be said.
 * Brian May, as quoted in "Queen Is Alive, Long Live The Queen" by Corey Levitan, in Circus Magazine (30 September 1992).

 * If I didn't have Freddie Mercury's lyrics to hold on to as a kid, I don't know where I would be. It taught me about all forms of music. It would open my mind. I never really had a bigger teacher in my whole life.
 * Axl Rose, as quoted in "Queen Is Alive, Long Live The Queen" by Corey Levitan, in Circus Magazine (30 September 1992).

 * We were very close friends, he was a very special person to me. Freddie was probably the most creative individual I ever met, and he was really fun. He had a great zest for life. He was also very unselfish and very caring. He put himself out to work with me and it was a phenomenal experience.
 * Billy Squier, as quoted in "Queen Is Alive, Long Live The Queen" by Corey Levitan, in Circus Magazine (30 September 1992).

 * I adored Freddie Mercury and Queen had a hit called Radio Gaga. That's why I love the name. Freddie was unique - one of the biggest personalities in the whole of pop music. He was not only a singer but also a fantastic performer, a man of the theatre and someone who constantly transformed himself. In short: a genius.
 * Lady Gaga, as quoted in "My new album is all about the dark side of celebrity, says Lady Gaga" by John Dingwall, in Dailyrecord.co.uk (27 November 2009).

 * Freddie Mercury was - and remains - my biggest influence. The combination of his sarcastic approach to writing lyrics and his 'I don't give a fuck' attitude really inspired my music.”
 * Katy Perry, as quoted in "Freddie Mercury inspired Katy Perry to 'Kiss A Girl", in NME.com (26 September 2008).

 * I’m a Freddie Mercury fan. (In response to an interviewer backstage at a Queen concert at the LA Forum, who asked: Can I tell my  viewers that Michael Jackson is a Queen fan?)
 * Michael Jackson, as quoted in "Michael Jackson: Life in the Magical Kingdom", in Rolling Stone (17 February 1983).

 * Every band should study Queen at Live Aid. If you really feel like that barrier is gone, you become Freddie Mercury. I consider him the greatest frontman of all time. Like, it's funny? you'd imagine that Freddie was more than human, but … You know how he controlled Wembley Stadium at Live Aid in 1985? He stood up there and did his vocal warm ups with the audience. Something that intimate, where they realize, 'Oh yeah, he's just a f***ing dude.
 * Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, as quoted in "Dave Grohl: How To Make An Arena Feel Like A Punk Club'' in NPR (2011).

 * What I dug about him so much is he was completely uninhibited as a performer. He just didn't care. He would just go out and wear what he wanted — nothing mattered. He wasn't afraid. As a young performer, that's what you aspire to:to be able to not care. The more you restrict yourself within the confines of an established art form like jazz, when you become successful at it, it becomes more and more difficult to be uninhibited, because you like the success, you like what's happening to you.
 * Freddie Mercury was one of those guys who didn't care. That's extremely rare, I think, When you  couple that with his musical abilities, well, I wouldn't say he was the greatest piano player in the world, but he was certainly intensely musical. And his vocals; there's a guy I wouldn't want to have a cutting contest with as a singer. He had just silly ability. When you listen to his vibrato, it's erratic. That's just talent, straight-up talent and creativity. That's ridiculous. Imagine what he would have been able to do if he had been trained. It wouldn't have affected his spontaneity or creativity. I think that's a big myth, this idea that when you become educated, it takes away from the soulful part. That's just once-in-a-century talent.
 * Harry Connick, Jr, as quoted in "PBS lights the way for Harry Connick Jr. ''by Alex Strachan, in Calgary Herald (3, March 2011).

 * Of all the more theatrical rock performers, Freddie took it further than the rest... he took it over the edge. And of course, I always admired a man who wears tights. I only saw him in concert once and as they say, he was definitely a man who could hold an audience in the palm of his hand.
 * David Bowie, as quoted in "Queen singer is rock's first major AIDS casualty" by Jeffry Ressner in Rolling Stone Magazine (9 January 1992).

 * My lifetime role model and hero is Freddie Mercury of Queen. His songwriting skills, I cannot even approach, but his showmanship, I learned it from videos. I’m No. 1 in the U.K. right now, so if I have any chance to go there, I want to meet Queen and to tell them how much I got inspired by their music.
 * Psy, as quoted in "His Style Is Gangnam, and Viral Too" by Melena Ryzik, in New York Times (14 October 2012).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Freddie Mercury


text:
Talk:Niccolò Machiavelli

I suggest that the "Attributed" quotes be removed until their authenticity can be verified, considering the many pseudobeliefs that are currently popular regarding Machiavelli and his work. It seems fashionable to think soley that Machiavelli was an extreme authoritarian (especially in the current political climate in America), which is debatable by the students of Italian history and political science, and I think these "Attributed" quotes do not well-reflect his varied work to an ordinary reader looking for knowledge on the subject. Naturally, I defer motion to my fellow Wikians. --AFasih

 * I agree. --GenkiNeko

 * I disagree. Ideally most of the "Attributed" quotes in articles will eventually become "Sourced" to genuine documentation. If there are quotes that are commonly attributed to someone erroneously, these should be pointed out as "Misattributions" within Wikiquote articles, or on the talk pages, as has been done elsewhere, such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, & Talk:John F. Kennedy. If anyone feels the selections that have been made are imbalanced, they should add some which provide greater balance, not remove genuine or attributed quotes they might simply feel to be "unrepresentative". I am now restoring some deletions that recently occurred ~ Achilles 10:08, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Original Source
Could one of the editors, who is literate in Italian, please locate in the original (untranslated) text the original statements, and add them on? See Francis Bacon's quotes in Latin for reference.

many thanks

One of the unsourced quotes
One of the quotes that was listed as 'unsourced' was "Men sooner forget being robbed of their fathers than of their patrimony."

I found a quote very similar to this (probably an alternate translation) in Chapter 17 of The Prince: "men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony."

I got this quote from a version of the book published in 1935 by Oxford University Press, Inc. I think that seems a bit dated, if someone else has a more modern edition / translation of The Prince, perhaps they could check it to see if they can find that quote in the chapter, "Of Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared."

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Niccolò Machiavelli. --Antiquary 18:30, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

 * He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafter fall with the greatest loss.

 * Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.

 * War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

 * A leader ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred.

 * Men sooner forget being robbed of their fathers than of their patrimony.

 * He who conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself.

 * Some of them can be found in the original italian form here (above translations are quite accurate): https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=qZEHAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP16 --193.111.70.3 13:38, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Koestler's version (in Quotes section)
I replaced Koestler's amended version of Machiavelli's advice to Rafael Girolami with a translation of the original text, in context. Notice how Koestler's out-of-context paraphrasing of the passage changes it from an admonition to be as honest as possible within the bounds of necessary diplomatic confidentiality, to a recommendation to be as sneakily dishonest as you like while covering your butt. - Embram (talk) 22:09, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Any man who tries to be good...

 * Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.

There's no shortage of image memes (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Any+man+who+tries+to+be+good+all+the+time+is+bound&iar=images), but without alternative sources as happen often with popular misattributed quotes. It seems to be (https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/16201.Niccol_Machiavelli) from The Prince. ~ JasonCarswell (talk) 21:28, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

The Prince, Ch. 22
Whose translation is "The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him."? It's not Ricci's or Marriott's. Mcljlm (talk) 14:00, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Niccolò Machiavelli


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User:Rj~enwikiquote

Harriet Tubman

Kofi Annan

Marianne Williamson

title: User:Rj~enwikiquote


text:
Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman (c. March 1822 – 10 March 1913), also known as Moses, was an African-American abolitionist.

Quotes

 * I prayed all night long for my master. Till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me. I changed my prayer. First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way'.
 * As quoted in Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1971), by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, pp. 14-15.
 * I can't die but once.
 * As quoted in The Underground Railroad (1987) by Charles L. Blockson
 * I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.
 * As quoted in Women's Words : The Columbia Book of Quotations by Women (1996) by Mary Biggs, p. 2

Harriet, The Moses of Her People (1886)

 * Quotations of Tubman from Harriet, The Moses of Her People (1886) by.

 * I looked at my hands, to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory over everything, de sun came like gold trou de trees, and over de fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.
 * On realizing that she had passed out of the slavery states into the northern states
 * Modernized rendition: I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came up like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.
 * I knew of a man who was sent to the State Prison for twenty-five years. All these years he was always thinking of his home, and counting by years, months, and days, the time till he should be free, and see his family and friends once more. The years roll on, the time of imprisonment is over, the man is free. He leaves the prison gates, he makes his way to his old home, but his old home is not there. The house in which he had dwelt in his childhood had been torn down, and a new one had been put up in its place; his family were gone, their very name was forgotten, there was no one to take him by the hand to welcome him back to life. So it was wid me. I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in de old cabin quarter, wid de ole folks, and my brudders and sisters. But to dis solemn resolution I came; I was free, and dey should be free also; I would make a home for dem in de North, and de Lord helping me, I would bring dem all dere. Oh, how I prayed den, lying all alone on de cold, damp ground; 'Oh, dear Lord,' I said, 'I haint got no friend but you. Come to my help, Lord, for I'm in trouble!'
 * Modernized rendition: So it was with me. I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter, with the old folks, and my brothers and sisters. But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also; I would make a home for them in the North, and the Lord helping me, I would bring them all there. Oh, how I prayed then, lying all alone on the cold damp ground; 'Oh, dear Lord', I said. I haven't got no friend but you. Come to my help Lord, for I'm in trouble!
 * Oh, Lord! You've been wid me in six troubles, don't desert me in the seventh!
 * Modernized rendition: Oh, Lord! You've been with me in six troubles, don't desert me in the seventh!

 * I had reasoned dis out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have de oder; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when de time came for me to go, de Lord would let dem take me.
 * Modernized rendition: I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.
 * The phrase "" is a slogan made famous during the independence struggle of several countries.

Disputed

 * I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.
 * Attributed to Tubman in Dorothy Winbush Riley, My Soul Looks Back 'Less I Forget p. 148 (1993). Riley gives a date of "c. 1865" but offers no citation. No source from earlier than 1993 is known. Quoted in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999) by Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah, p. 299. Tubman specialists like Jean H. Humez and Kate Clifford Larson deem this one completely spurious. See "Bogus Tubman," by Steve Perisho.
 * Children, if you are tired, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.
 * "Harriet Tubman never said this — it comes from one of the scores of juvenile Harriet Tubman fictionalized biographies." — Kate Larson, Harriet Tubman biographer.
 * I love all of the african americans like they are my children.
 * "African american" seems an ananchronistic term here, as the term was seldom used before the 1970s.

Quotes about Tubman

 * Alphabetized by author

 * The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free."
 * Paula Gunn Allen The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986)

 * The love of democracy motivated Harriet Tubman to seek and find not only her own freedom, but to make innumerable trips to the slave South to gain the liberty of many slaves and instill the idea into the hearts of thousands that freedom is possible.
 * Maya Angelou Letter to My Daughter (2009)

 * I bring you one of the best and bravest persons on this continent — General Tubman as we call her.
 * John Brown, introducing her to Wendell Phillips, as quoted in The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898) by Wilbur Henry Siebert, p. 185

 * Little Shirley grew up with a strong sense of her own destiny. Her early heroes were Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony.
 * April 1969 article in Shirley Chisholm: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (2021)

 * I’m obsessed with Harriet Tubman. I’m obsessed with, what was it like to walk in her shoes and to face her fears? So I always want to reach back and be like, OK, well, now what is the Harriet Tubman activity to do, in this time? And what is Harriet Tubman up to in 2063? — because there’s always someplace that needs justice and liberation.
 * Adrienne Maree Brown Interview with On Being (2022)

 * When she made it to freedom after having been a slave and she got to New York and she could have been so happy to just stay at home and just breathe a big sigh of relief but she kept going back down South to bring other freed slaves to freedom. And she used to say, "No matter what happens, keep going."
 * Hillary Clinton, as quoted in "Queen of Cringe : Hillary's Bogus "Black-Cent" by Michelle Malkin in The New York Post (25 April 2007)

 * When slaves sang, "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home, they may have appeared to be evoking freedom in the afterlife, but wasn't it true that they were also singing about Harriet Tubman-the chariot, Harriet, who rescued so many women and men, helping them to discover freedom in this life?
 * 1992 interview in Conversations with Angela Davis Edited by Sharon Lynette Jones (2021)

 * Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day — you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt " God bless you " has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown — of sacred memory — I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you. It is to me a great pleasure and a great privilege to bear testimony to your character and your works, and to say to those to whom you may come, that I regard you in every way truthful and trustworthy.
 * Frederick Douglass, letter to Harriet Tubman (29 August 1868), as quoted in Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886) by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, p. 135. Also quoted in The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898) by Wilbur Henry Siebert, p. 185
 * I never met any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God.
 * Thomas Garrett, as quoted in Sounding Forth the Trumpet : 1837-1860 by Peter Marshall and David Manuel, p. 358

 * We have a woman in our country who has received the name of "Moses," not by lying about it, but by acting out -a woman who has gone down into the Egypt of slavery and brought out hundreds of our people into liberty. The last time I saw that woman, her hands were swollen. That woman who had led one of Montgomery's most successful expeditions, who was brave enough and secretive enough to act as a scout for the American army, had her hands all swollen from a conflict with a brutal conductor, who undertook to eject her from her place. That woman, whose courage and bravery won a recognition from our army and from every black man in the land, is excluded from every thoroughfare of travel.
 * Frances Harper "We Are All Bound Up Together" (1866)

 * Numerous American heroes-such as Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and Henry David Thoreau-led rebellious acts to reconcile the government's actions with the country's promise of liberty for all its citizens.
 * Carl Hart Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (2021)

 * We have had the greatest heroine of the age here, Harriet Tubman, a, and a fugitive slave, who has been back eight times secretly and brought out in all sixty slaves with her, including all her own family, besides aiding many more in other ways to escape. Her tales of adventure are beyond anything in fiction and her ingenuity and generalship are extraordinary. I have known her for some time and mentioned her in speeches once or twice — the slaves call her Moses. She has had a reward of twelve thousand dollars offered for her in Maryland and will probably be burned alive whenever she is caught, which she probably will be, first or last, as she is going again. She has been in the habit of working in hotels all summer and laying up money for this crusade in the winter. She is jet black and cannot read or write, only talk, besides acting.
 * Thomas Wentworth Higginson in a letter to his mother (17 June 1859), as published in Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906 (1921), p. 81

 * According to Tubman’s own words, and extensive documentation on her rescue missions, we know that she rescued about 70 people – family and friends – during approximately 13 trips to Maryland ... In addition to the family and friends, Tubman also gave instruction to another 70 or so freedom seekers from the Eastern Shore who found their way to freedom on their own.
 * Kate Clifford Larson, Harriet Tubman Myths and Facts

 * In the 1970s we were rediscovering women whose lives had been dropped out of history or distorted, like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hannah Senesch, Ethel Rosenberg.
 * Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)

 * While she was certainly a nurse, spy, and scout for the Union Army, I think the claims that she was the first female general and commanded a raid are wishful thinking.
 * Milton Sernett, The Truths Behind the Myth of Harriet Tubman, Maxwell Perspective, Spring 2008

 * I have known Harriet long, and a nobler, higher spirit or a truer, seldom dwells in human form.
 * William H. Seward, as quoted in The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898) by Wilbur Henry Siebert, p. 185

 * Harriet Tubman, like John Mason, did not reckon the value of her own liberty in comparison with the liberty of others who had not tasted its sweets. Like him, she saw in the oppression of her race the sufferings of the enslaved Israelites, and was not slow to demand that the Pharaoh of the South should let her people go. She was known to many of the anti-slavery leaders of her generation; her personality and her power were such that none of them ever forgot the high virtues of this simple black woman.
 * Wilbur Henry Siebert in The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898), p. 185

 * I am where I am because of the bridges that I crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge. Harriet Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells was a bridge. Madam C. J. Walker was a bridge. Fannie Lou Hamer was a bridge.
 * Oprah Winfrey, as quoted in Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul (2006) by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Lisa Nichols, p. 1

 * Herself born a slave, she first tasted the sweets of liberty in 1849. She subsequently made nineteen excursions south and brought off over three hundred fugitives from bondage.
 * W. H. Withrow, in "The Underground Railway" (27 May 1902) as published in Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Second series, Vol. 8 (1902), p. 61

 * She made nineteen dangerous trips back and forth, often disguised, escorting more than three hundred slaves to freedom, always carrying a pistol, telling the fugitives, "You'll be free or die." She expressed her philosophy: "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive...."
 * Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

title: Harriet Tubman


text:
Jack Handey

Jack Handey (born 25 February 1949) is an American humorist. He is most famous for his Deep Thoughts, a large corpus of surrealistic one-liner jokes. Deep Thoughts were first seen in small comedy magazine Army Man Comics edited by George Meyer and continued in National Lampoon in 1984 though gained popularity when they were read on Saturday Night Live beginning in 1991.

Quotes

 * If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
 * Deep Thoughts: Inspiration for the Uninspired (1992), Berkley Books, ISBN 0-425-13365-6

 * I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they'd never expect it.
 * Deep Thoughts: Inspiration for the Uninspired (1992), Berkley Books, ISBN 0-425-13365-6

 * If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did."
 * Deep Thoughts: Inspiration for the Uninspired (1992), Berkley Books, ISBN 0-425-13365-6

 * It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.
 * Deep Thoughts: Inspiration for the Uninspired (1992), Berkley Books, ISBN 0-425-13365-6

 * IF YOU ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone.
 * Deeper Thoughts : All New, All Crispy (1993), Hachette Books, ISBN 1-56282-840-1

 * TO ME, it's a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, "Hey, can you give me a hand?" you can say, "Sorry, got these sacks."
 * Deeper Thoughts : All New, All Crispy (1993), Hachette Books, ISBN 1-56282-840-1

 * IF YOU GO through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance.
 * Deeper Thoughts : All New, All Crispy (1993), Hachette Books, ISBN 1-56282-840-1

 * MAYBE in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Basically, it's made up of two separate words — "mank" and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.
 * Deeper Thoughts: All New, All Crispy (1993), Hachette Books, ISBN 1-56282-840-1

 * I guess we were kinda poor when we were kids, but we didn't know it. That's because my dad always refused to let us look at the family's financial records.
 * Fuzzy Memories (1996), Andrews McMeel Publishing, ISBN 0-8362-1040-9

title: Jack Handey