A Quote by Henry David Thoreau
As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.
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To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving.
Perseverance. I got cut twice. I got cut in Charlotte. I didn't have to go to Atlanta to audition. I could have said, "I'm not cut out for this." But I said, "I think I'm better than that, I can go try again." So I went to Atlanta and I made it through. Then I got cut the first time around. I could have told them I didn't want to come back for the Wild Card show but I did and look how far I got.
We have seen a lot of interest from Chinese developers on Google Play because the extent to which Android is used. If we can figure out a model by which we can serve those users, it would be a privilege to do so. So I don't think of China as a black hole.
Out of all my friends, I believe I'm the only kid whose dad made us work to cut rebars; we laid bricks in construction sites and did other real work every summer for minimum wage. Our dad said that it's important in the future that when we tell people to dig a hole, that you personally know how long it will take to dig that hole.
When I was a kid in the 6th grade and first learned how to dance with a girl, we had a record called 'Shake Rattle and Roll,' made by a group called Bill Haley and His Comets: 'Get out in that kitchen and rattle them pots and pans.' It was all about mundane things.
The Chinese are quite entrepreneurial. Remember when Lenovo bought IBM's PC division. It was said that China didn't need a brand name, China didn't need to buy Lenovo to get into the PC business, I remember reading a one-liner somewhere which struck me as quite possibly true, it said the one thing that the Chinese had not been able to copy or figure out was the way, in terms of systems, that Americans - it probably would be true for Europeans as well - that Americans install and live by their management systems, while China is still quite half-assed. Perhaps that is a true statement.
Once you're president, you can't go anywhere without causing trouble. President Obama shows up in China, he's chewing gum, they go crazy. A big stink because the president's chewing gum. And you think, the Chinese are so easygoing about human rights. What's the problem?
The world is full of pots jeering at kettles.
I really think it's extremely important for Americans to better understand China. And by better, I mean don't just read their lines. You've got to dig down to find out what's going on, and come over, see China.
Once you've started to dig a hole, you can't get out of it.
People think that once you're in movies your life changes in a crazy way. It really doesn't. If you choose to have it change in a crazy way, it will. I have my same groups of friends I was friends with in high school. We're all a bunch of really normal guys.
There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors.
China need to be fought back on. And what we need to do is go at the things that they are most sensitive and most embarrassing to them; that they're hiding; get that information and put it out in public. Let the Chinese people start to digest how corrupt the Chinese government is; how they steal from the Chinese people; and how they're enriching oligarchs all throughout China.
If a pot can multiply. One day Nasrudin lent his cooking pots to a neighbour, who was giving a feast. The neighbour returned them, together with one extra one – a very tiny pot. 'What is this?' asked Nasrudin. 'According to law, I have given you the offspring of your property which was born when the pots were in my care,' said the joker. Shortly afterwards Nasrudin borrowed his neighbour's pots, but did not return them. The man came round to get them back. 'Alas!' said Nasrudin, 'they are dead. We have established, have we not, that pots are mortal?'.
A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue - which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.
I've read hundreds of books about China over the decades. I know the Chinese. I've made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind.
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