China Quotes

The farms of Shensi may be described as slanting… There are few genuine mountains, only endless broken hills, hills as interminable as a sentence by James Joyce, and even more tiresome. Yet the effect is often strikingly like Picasso.

All Chinese are Confucianists when successful, and Taoists when they are failures.

Chinese is a language of fifteen thousand words and none of them in English.

If I were an Englishman, I should esteem the man who advised a war with China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.

China to be the greatest living enemy of my country. You would be beaten in the end, and perhaps a revolution in India would follow.

Yes, it is indeed a great wall. (at the Great Wall of China)

You shouldn’t stay here too long, or you’ll turn slitty-eyed. (to some British students in China)

It (China) was the Middle Ages with electric light and no Pope.

If you ask a Japanese to choose between spending the rest of his life on an island with either a Chinese or an Englishman, he will pick the Chinese, who would presumably become his slave; the Chinese confronted with a similar choice, would almost certainly pick the Englishman, who he assumes might be educated to […]

When I edged up to the subject he said “Nyet, nyet. You are a subtle man, you are trying to trap me into talking about China. They are our allies, our good relations,” and here he stopped. I then said that without getting him “into the ally business, “I’d like to ask just one question: […]