Asia Quotes

“People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.”
― Roman Payne, Crepuscule

“It is not power that corrupts but fear.”
― Aung San Suu Kyi

“I've read hundreds of books about China over the decades. I know the Chinese. I've made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind.”
― Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal

“In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins."

And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia

“Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves. There are Greek troops, to be sure, in Persian service — but how different is their cause from ours! They will be fighting for pay — and not much of at that; we, on the contrary, shall fight for Greece, and our hearts will be in it. As for our foreign troops — Thracians, Paeonians, Illyrians, Agrianes — they are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe, and they will find as their opponents the slackest and softest of the tribes of Asia. And what, finally, of the two men in supreme command? You have Alexander, they — Darius!”
― Alexander the Great

“In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Nobody gives way to anybody. Everyone just angles, points, dives directly toward his destination, pretending it is an all-or-nothing gamble. People glare at one another and fight for maneuvering space. All parties are equally determined to get the right-of-way--insist on it. They swerve away at the last possible moment, giving scant inches to spare. The victor goes forwards, no time for a victory grin, already engaging in another contest of will. Saigon traffic is Vietnamese life, a continuous charade of posturing, bluffing, fast moves, tenacity and surrenders.”
― Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

“Asia is an entertainment, Europe is a dream, America is an imprisonment and Rest is a nightmare.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim 'worked' well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: 'It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.'

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Il senso della ricerca sta nel cammino fatto e non nella meta; il fine del viaggiare è il viaggiare stesso e non l'arrivare.”
― Tiziano Terzani, In Asia

“Seriously, just have the gonads to quote yourself! ^__^”
― T F Rhoden

“No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.”
― Kyoko Yoshida

“In Asia the people who argued for continuity with the colonial institutions became the leaders. In Africa they were imprisoned.”
― Bruce Gilley

“Unlike other nations that rose earlier in Asia, China is much harder to fit into the Western-led global order.”
― S. Jaishankar, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World

“Asya' denince aklınıza ne geliyor? Çekik gözler? "Çan çin çon" sözü? Yoksulluk? Yoksa uyanan bir dev mi? Bu kitap, size Asya'da çok daha fazlasının olduğunu gösterecek.Avrupalılardan daha önce, Amerika'yı ilk keşfeden Türk kökenli Çinli amiral Zheng He ile 1421'de uzun bir deniz yolculuğuna çıkacak; oradan 2500 yıl önce Çinli bilge Sun Tzu tarafından yazılmış ilk strateji kitabının sayfalarında gezinecek, ama sonra bu bilgelik ve felsefe ülkesinin bugünkü toplumsal çöküşüne tanık olacağız. Don Kişot'tan önce bir Japonyalı kadın yazar tarafından yazılmış ilk romanı birlikte okuyacak, 'Japon mucizesi' üstüne düşüneceğiz. Japonya'da aşırı çalıştırılmaktan ölümleri, Hindistan'da kast düzenini, Kuzey Kore-Güney Kore sorununu, yorucu çözümlemelere girmeden, hepimizin okuyabileceği akıcılıkta gözden geçireceğiz. Siyam ikizlerinin öyküsünü öğrenip yine Siyam'dan bir köy romancısını tanıyacağız.Ve en sonunda, "Antarktika Tellioğullarınındır!" deyip Antarktika üstüne sürmekte olan paylaşım savaşını ele alacağız.
Ve her bir yazıdan sonra, dinlenmek, sanatın o hoşduyusuna kapılmak için Asya'dan çeşitli şiirler okuyacağız: "Ekmek parası mı kazanayım şiir mi yazayım?" diyecek Nepalli bir şair... İşgal dönemi Koresi'nden bir şair, "çalınmış tarlalara da gelir mi bahar?" diye soracak ülkesini düşünerek... "Benim ülkem cennet değildir" diyecek Filipinli bir şair, ülkesindeki yoksunluklara tanık olmamış turistlere... Ve Jose Rizal, bağımsız düşüncenin bu yiğit oğlu, son hoşçakalıyla veda edecek hepimize ve ardından bir şair "henüz değil Rizal henüz değil" diyecek...Yorucu olmayan ama uzun bir yolculuğa çıkaracak sizi bu kitap ve bittiğinde, kitabı okumadan önce Asya'ya ilişkin ne kadar az şey bildiğinizi şaşırarak farkedeceksiniz...”
― Ulaş Başar Gezgin, Asya Yazıları

“Time has come to tell this: Vietnam is not a war, it is a country. Long time passed after the (pro)American movies and sympathetic documentaries. Vietnam is now known as a country of transition more or less resembling Asia in general. That was why -we were told by Dr. Gezgin who poses both as an academic and a journalist- this book is called as ‘Vietnam & Asia in Flux’. This flow is not auspicious for researchers however: “Since Vietnamese economy is a transition economy, the parameters have changed so frequently that economists studying Vietnamese development experience time lags between their explanation and the practice, most of the time. Preparing economics reports takes time and in the meanwhile the economy changes again, turning some of the proposals in the papers obsolete. Thus Vietnamese economy poses one of Zeno’s paradoxes for the researchers.”

Accepting this paradox, this book provides signi ficant insights on social issues of Vietnam. Dr. Gezgin (whose name means ‘traveler’ in his native language) invites you to a journey to Vietnamese and Asian social tmosphere…”
― Ulaş Başar Gezgin, Vietnam & Asia in Flux, 2008

“Cung went to his section commander Corporal Binh Chien Bui and spoke to him. He said, “Binh, come quickly, something strange is going on!”
― Michael G Kramer Omieaust, A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two

“Ogni posto è una miniera. Basta lasciarcisi andare. Darsi tempo, stare seduti in una casa da tè a osservare la gente che passa, mettersi in un angolo del mercato, andare a farsi i capelli e poi seguire il bandolo in una matassa che può cominciare con una parola che si è appena incontrata e il posto più scialbo, più insignificante della terra diventa uno specchio del mondo, una finestra sulla vita, un teatro di umanità dinanzi al quale ci si potrebbe fermare senza più bisogno di andare altrove. La miniera è esattamente là dove si è: basta scavare.”
― Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

“Le stazioni sono vere, sono specchi delle città nel cui cuore sono piantate. Le stazioni stanno vicine alle cattedrali, alle moschee, alle pagode o ai mausoleo. Una volta arrivati lì, si è arrivati davvero.”
― Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

“building for scale that you don't need is a waste of effort and may lock you into an inflexible design.”
― Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications

“The invasion of Taiwan will be a navy war.”
― Steven Magee

“China has the world’s largest navy, much larger than the USA.”
― Steven Magee

“Mozasu era convinto che la vita fosse più simile al pachinko, nel quale anche il caso aveva un ruolo importante.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“How many people do you know who have hitchhiked across all Russia, Asia and even India?”
― Martins Ate, Destination: Me: 108 Ascetic Days Across Eurasia

“What looks to Westerners like Asian deference, in other words, is actually a deeply felt concern for the sensibilities of others. As the psychologist Harris Bond observes, “It is only those from an explicit tradition who would label [the Asian] mode of discourse ‘selfeffacement.’ Within this indirect tradition it might be labeled ‘relationship honouring.’ ” And relationship honoring leads to social dynamics that can seem remarkable from a Western perspective. It’s because of relationship honoring, for example, that social anxiety disorder in Japan, known as taijin kyofusho, takes the form not of excessive worry about embarrassing oneself, as it does in the United States, but of embarrassing others.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“E non solo vale la pena di provare fino in fondo, ma è anche necessario. Se parole come «generosità» e «libertà» non esistono nel loro vocabolario, vuol dire che questi concetti non sono ancora nati nello spirito dell’Asia. Ma c’è voluto tempo prima di manifestarsi in Europa, quegli stessi concetti non esistevano nemmeno fra noi occidentali. C’è voluto tempo perché sfiorassero le nostre coscienze, e poi crescessero e vivessero nelle nostre azioni.”
― Bernard Moitessier, Tamata e l'alleanza by Bernard Moitessier

“У 1787 році, вирушивши з Відня на захід до Праги, Моцарт писав, що перетнув східний кордон. Схід і Захід, Азія і Європа завжди були розділені у свідомості щонайменше так само як і земля — кордонами.”
― Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945