Quotations (14)

1 to 14 of 14 items
Every one of these books must have passed through the hands of a thousand people or more before they reached me, and so they were in a terrible state of disrepair, with easily a dozen or more pages missing from the beginning and the same…
I feel that for a reader to truly encounter an author sometimes depends on finding the right moment. (我觉得鲁迅是不属于孩子们的,他属于成熟并且敏感的读者。同时我还觉得,一个读者与一个作家的真正相遇,有时候需要时机。) === Money is an unseemly topic that may well be deplored by gentlemen of…
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an…
“The weak fear the strong,” the Chinese saying goes, “the strong fear the violent, and the violent fear the reckless.” === China moved from Mao Zedong’s monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping’s polychrome era of economics…
Unequal lives give rise to unequal dreams. About ten years ago China Central Television interviewed Chinese youngsters on Children’s Day, asking them what gift they would most like to receive. A boy in Beijing wanted a Boeing jet of his…
“Chairman Mao teaches us” and “Mr. Lu Xun says” were the standard political tags punctuating speeches and articles throughout the land. === China “grassroots” has come to be used in a broad sense to denote disadvantaged classes that…
In China there’s a saying, “People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat,” reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher. On the other hand, as Rupert Hoogewerf (aka Hu Run), the…
The word here rendered as “copycat”* originally denoted a mountain hamlet protected by a stockade or other fortifications; later it acquired an extended meaning as a hinterland area, home to the poor. It was also a name once given to the…
After the tainted-milk scandal was exposed, it became clear that it was not just the Sanlu Group in Shijiazhuang whose infant formulas had astronomical levels of melamine; many other producers’ infant formula exceeded the limits to varying…
As the copycat concept has gained acceptance, plagiarism, piracy, burlesque, parody, slander, and other actions originally seen as vulgar or illegal have been given a reason to exist; and in social psychology and public opinion they have…
In their colorful history during these past thirty years, the grassroots have performed feats unimaginable to us in the past, doing things their own way, through different channels. In Western terms, “all roads lead to Rome,” and in…
What is 忽悠?* Originally it meant “to sway unsteadily”—like fishing boats bobbing on the waves, for example, or leaves shaking in the wind. Later it developed a new life as an idiom particularly popular in northeast China, derived from…
Chinese expression goes, “using four ounces to shift a thousand pounds,” or as Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” === Just as “copycat” gives imitation and piracy a new range of connotations, “bamboozle”…
For a bamboozler is quite likely to end up bamboozling himself or—in Chinese parlance—to pick up a big stone only to drop it on his own foot. === Chinese people have a superstitious faith in certain numbers, believing that the number six,…