Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Evan Osnos - Page 2

Walking, it turns out, is a sublime way to get to know people in China. They're used to meeting strangers on the road. Many here understand what it feels like to walk a long way.

When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.

Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.

Like most markets, Da Jing is most alive just after dawn, when the elementary-school children in their uniforms and bright red kerchiefs set off through narrow streets, marking the start of another frenzied day of commerce.

In Beijing, the joke among hacks is that, after the drive in from the airport, you are ready to write a column; after a month, you feel the stirrings of an idea-book; but after a year, you struggle to write anything at all, because you've finally discovered just how much you don't know.

China's Communist Party is wary of independent-minded movements.

When Libya was in turmoil in 2011, the Chinese public was surprised to discover that more than thirty thousand of their countrymen were living there, most of them working on Chinese-run oil projects.

When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.

The fastest way to get around the southern Chinese city of Foshan is on the back of a motorcycle-for-hire.

In 1975, the collapse of a cascade of Chinese dams during a flood killed a hundred and seventy-one thousand people, but the event is rarely discussed, and the names of the victims are largely unrecorded today.

It can take the uninitiated a minute to realize that 'Gangnam Style' is satire.

Valuing the road over the goal was a Taoist goal in itself.

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

Christianity is permitted under China's constitution, and the government has long supported a network of official Christian churches.

In Chinese, there are an impressive number of ways to describe saying nothing at all.

Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.

In a city that worships the new and the sleek, the street market at Da Jing Road is willfully out of step. It is a splendid jumble of centuries, full of sizzling pot stickers and bleating cell phones, pungent rice wine and bullfrogs as plump as softballs.

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

The Da Jing street market is little more than a few narrow intersections, barely six blocks long. But for a visitor, it is a living, breathing education in Shanghai cuisine, a style distinguished by its thick savory sauces spiked with sugar and soy sauce.

In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission.

For years, China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking or intellectual-property violations in order to protect their broader interests in the country.

I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working.

Confucius - or Kongzi, which means Master Kong - was not born to power, but his idiosyncrasies and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics.

Lei Feng is reported to have died in a freak accident in 1962 - struck by a falling telephone pole.

In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.

For all that we can see from the road in China, there is a lot that we cannot see. We miss what's behind the trees, the cover-ups, the darker side of things - the ingredients that so often drive a reporting trip.

Fact-checking can wreak havoc on Chinese political mythology.

For much of their history, life for most people in China was arduous and circumscribed - and people travelled as little as they could.

For years, American officials visiting China marvelled at how Chinese leaders could push through infrastructure projects and sweeping legislative changes without the complications of opposition and the niceties of voting.

China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.

By the Nineties, so many people were moonlighting and creating their own professional identities that China generated a brisk new business in the printing of business cards.

To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.

Chinese leaders are saying amongst themselves, according to the Chinese analysts who follow them most closely, that they believe Donald Trump is in the end making hollow threats, and they think that he would be easy to handle, is how one of them put it.

Often Americans have heard Donald Trump be very hard on China. But that's not how it's heard over there. In China, his message is being interpreted as the sound of an exhausted America, an America that is seeking to withdraw from its commitments to NATO, to holding up, for instance, human rights around the world.

Donald Trump is an American presidential nominee who was describing Russia in terms that they haven't heard almost ever. And so there is a belief that Donald Trump would be a collaborative, willing and I think perhaps quite able partner.

Orville Schell and John Delury have delivered a brilliantly original and essential book: the road map to China’s quest for national salvation... Vivid, literate, and brimming with insights, Wealth and Power deserves to become a classic.

When we remember presidents who didn't fulfill their promises - for instance George H.W. Bush saying no new taxes or Barack Obama saying he would close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay - we remember those because they're the exceptions, not the rule.

If you go back and you look at the presidency over the course of history, presidents tend to do what they campaigned on. In the 20th century, presidents between Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter accomplished 73 percent of the things that they said they would do as candidates. Part of that is because once they get into office, their credibility, their ability to do anything depends on doing the things that they said they would.

Donald Trump has the ability to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal as he says, but if he were to do so, this would be regarded in Tehran as an abrogation of the deal. This would allow the Iranian side of the deal to in effect withdraw because they could say that the United States has not held up its end of the bargain, and therefore we're going to restart our nuclear program.

Actually the idea of having Mexico pay for the wall on the southern border is a nonstarter. That seems to be generally pretty much recognized on both sides of the border. What you find, though, is that logistically it's not impossible.