There is no question but that you and I think alike in the great objectives of the peace when it comes. The real problem lies in t...he methods to be used to attain peace without hate.... [I]t is my thought that time is an essential in disseminating the ideals of peace among the very diverse nationalities and national egos of a vast number of separate peoples who, for one reason or another over a thousand years, have divided themselves into a hundred different forms of hate.... Therefore, I have been visualizing a superimposed--or if you like it, a superassumed--obligation by Russia, China, Britain and ourselves that we will act as sheriffs for the maintenance of order during the transition period.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 »
Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of ...generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the ...two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tschina (as they call it), which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the earth. Perhaps supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that, as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.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 »