A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it's blundering into. And it knows that ...
The Americans were constantly hectoring Africans about their behavior and values—protecting oneself against AIDS, limited family size, sleeping under mosquito nets. Chinese messages… focused on big, tangible things that fairly shouted: This stadi...
It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hing...
The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Isl...
In Shanghai, there were several pro-right circles of former officers. They realized that the Great War and European revolutions were a direct consequence of rotten liberalism. Words like order, family, discipline and duty didn't mean anything anymore...
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was w...
[first title cards] Title card: People give up their lives for many reasons. Title card: For friendship, for love, for an ideal Title card: And people kill for the same reasons... Title card: Before China was one great country, it was divided into se...
And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the a...
I was missing lectures leading up to an essay test, so I went downstairs & got my textbook & pretended to study, with Animal Planet playing in the background. Everyone we learned about was either white or some sort of predecessor of the white, Christ...
There is one element in Christianity which was not borrowed from Paganism -- religious intolerance. Referring to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, a writer on China says: 'Between the followers of the three national religions there is not only a to...
I would tell young journalists to be brave and go against the tide. When everyone else is relying on the internet, you should not; when nobody's walking, you should walk; when few people are reading profound books, you should read. ... rather than se...
I didn't know what I wanted to Be...A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of 3 working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting surfboards...I ...
Pop culture. Nobody does bullshit better than us. Right? China took over manufacturing. And the Middle East has us on fossil fuels. That's just geography and politics. We're a nation of whacko immigrants. Scavengers and con men. We crossed the ocean ...
Miss West is never idle. Below, in the big after-room, she does her own laundering. Nor will she let the steward touch her father's fine linen. In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine. All hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work...
Miss Appleby, her library books, and her story-telling sessions were very popular with all the children in Heavenly Valley. To Nancy and Plum they were a magic carpet that whisked them out of the dreariness and drudgery of their lives at Mrs. Monday'...
His words thrummed in, deep, imprinting themselves on her very deepest, deepest, deep bits. “I believe I am your destiny. You are mine, as I am yours. We shall be one. So one that your air will be mine, your scent mine, your blood will fill my vein...
The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth – that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans – is as absurd & dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It conde...
In 2002, after the huge success of Who Moved my Cheese? a management manual that sold 1.6million copies in China, there was a rush of books inspired by it. Titles included Whose Cheese Should I Move?; Can I Move Your Cheese?; Who Dares to Move my Che...
Suppose just five percent of the tens of thousands of people in Tiananmen Square at that time had portable phones, digital cameras, and video cameras, and the content from 10% of those devices had been uploaded and spread via the 'Net? There wouldn't...
Caregivers, like all of us, inevitably reflect their culture's attitude toward children and life. The story goes that when Pearl Buck was a child in China, someone asked how she compared her mother to her Chinese amah. Buck replied, "If I want to hav...
[while cross-examining one of Maroni's thugs on the witness stand, the thug pulls a gun and fires it at Harvey Dent; it mis-fires, and Harvey decks the thug with a right cross, and takes the gun away] Harvey Dent: Carbon fiber, .28 Caliber, made in C...
