"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there’s no cat."
- Kongzi

"It does not matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat!"
- Deng Xiaoping

"24 June 1943: Kuomintang spies are being arrested. How many spies are there? And what gives Mao Zedong the right to suspect any communist of treason? And what sort of right is it, the right to supreme wisdom?"
- Pyotr Vladimirov

"My parents are Chinese and their son is also Chinese. Chinese people are never slaves!"
- Xie Jinyuan [to Wang Zhaoming]

"...better to be a broken jade than a whole tile."
- Jiang Zhongzheng [after the fall of Wuhan, 1938]

"Su’s writing is the best in the world. His only shortcoming is that he likes to rebuke people – in this, you must not follow his example!"
- Huang Tingjian [on Su Dongpo]

"A fabulous gangster city...the biggest and wildest free-for-all, unparalleled by any other metropolis... Beside it the Chicago of Al Capone was a staid, almost pious, provincial town."
- Han Suyin [on 1930s Shanghai]

"After having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots, they have begun to eat each other, and, what is more serious, have eaten a German sentry."
- Hermann Göring [to Galeazzo Ciano on Soviet prisoners]

"I am not disturbed by the loss of cities. If we lose too many, we shall build some more."
- Jiang Zhongzheng [to W.H Donald and Song Meiling, 1938]

"...we all gave her three cheers as she went. You could hear the faint cheers rippling over the water."
- Lt. Cmdr. George Cooper [on the sinking of HMS Exeter at Java Sea]

Monk - "What is Buddha?"
Dongshan Shouchu - "Three pounds of flax."

Monk - "What is the teaching that transcends the Buddha and patriarchs?"
Yunmen Wenyan - "A sesame bun."

Monk - "What is the meaning of the ancestral teacher’s coming from the West?"
Zhaozhou Congshen - "The cypress tree in front of the hall."

逢佛杀佛。
- Linji Yixuan

"Jiang Jieshi always tries to wrest every ounce of power and every ounce of gain from the people. And we? Our policy is to give him tit for tat and to fight for every inch of land. We act after his fashion. He always tries to impose war on the people, one sword in his left hand and another in his right. We take up swords, too, following his example... As Jiang Jieshi is now sharpening his swords, we must sharpen ours too."
- Mao Zedong

"The CCP members in the USSR keep criticizing everyone as American, British or Japanese thralls, but are not aware of themselves being complete Russian thralls."
[如中国共产党员之在俄者，但骂他人为美奴，英奴与日奴，而不知其本身已完全成为一俄奴矣。]
- Jiang Zhongzheng

"The Taiping Rebellion is a disease of the heart, Russia is a disease of the elbow and axilla, England is a disease of the skin. We should exterminate the Taiping first, then Russia and England."
[发捻交乘，心腹之患也。俄国壤地相接，有蚕食上国之志，肘腋之患也。英国志在通商，暴虐无人理，不为限制则无以自立，肢体之患也。故灭发捻为先，治俄次之，治英又次之。]
- Yixin

Robert Wylie Lloyd - "Gentlemen pay for their own cups of tea."
Edmund Hillary - "We’re New Zealanders, not gentlemen."

"The Big Bullock of the present government, the emperor, is not the son of the gods as your primary school teachers and others would have you believe. The ancestors of the present emperor came forth from a corner of Kyushu, killing and robbing people as they did. They then destroyed their fellow thieves [...] When it is said that the Imperial dynasty has continued for 2,500 years, it may seem as if the present emperor is divine, but down through the ages the emperors have been tormented by foreign opponents and, domestically, treated as puppets by their own vassals [...] Although this is well-known, university professors and their students, weaklings that they are, refuse to either say or write anything about it. Instead, they attempt to deceive both others and themselves, knowing all along the whole thing is a pack of lies."
- Uchiyama Gudō

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