[F]rankly ... it was perfectly true that I had, for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to Franc...e but that it should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country ... for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning.... France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better than that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chinese were born ... with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplan...ted too young, these qualities ripened in them.... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and name...d their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no such thing as a perfect leader either in the past or present, in China or elsewhere. If there is one, he is only prete...nding, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose in an effort to look like an elephant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have an intense personal interest in making the use of American capital in the development of China an instrument for the promot...ion of the welfare of China, and an increase in her material prosperity without entanglements or creating embarrassment affecting the growth of her independent political power, and the preservation of her territorial integrity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, ...it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill,--and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common,... disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"I'll love you dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet,... And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anyone who tries to keep track of what is happening in China is going to end up by wearing all the skin of his left ear from twirl...ing around on it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »