Asia Quotes - Page 11

• In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

  Robert M. Gates

  Army, Should Have, Land

  "Defense secretary warns against fighting more ground wars" by Larry Shaughnessy, www.cnn.com. February 26, 2011.

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Latin American has no tribe to fall back on, as the African does, no reliable judiciary to defend his rights as the European does, no social ideal or sacred constitution as the North American does, no pervasive mythology to soften life as it does in Asia, and no even an ideology to subscribe to, as does the Russian or Chinese. Without wealth, what is there left to him but his manhood, to be flaunted and defended at every occasion?

  Ted Simon

  Latin, Fall, Rights

  4 Copy quote

• I had been walking one afternoon in Scotland and thought: Why don't I just keep going? There was, I said, a magic in leaving a line of footprints stretching across Asia.

  Rory Stewart

  Scotland, Leaving, Magic

  Rory Stewart (2009). “The Places In Between”, p.30, Pan Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A top-quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year. ... That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top-quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away.

  Bill Gates

  Teacher, Motivation, Inspiration

  5 Copy quote

• The ideas of individual supremacy and the right of free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep America society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working.. In America itself, there is widespread crime and violence, old people feel forgotten, families are falling apart. And the media attacks the integrity and character of your leaders with impunity, drags down all those in authority and blames everyone but itself.

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Integrity, Fall, Character

  40 Copy quote

• You can't anticipate history. It's only when you look back you see what the Romans did, and what various other empires did, what the British Empire did. We're now beginning to see the long shadow that it created, so one must be hopeful and say that what's going on in Asia, that what's going on in the Middle East, that all these various areas of conflict, that they will pass and move onto another area. But it would seem that the natural order of things is there is this cyclic behavior of destruction followed by a calm period.

  Roma Tearne

  Moving, Order, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If in order to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia and particularly in Indo-China, if in order to avoid it we must take the risk by putting American boys in, I believe that the executive branch of the government has to take the politically unpopular position of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision.

  Richard M. Nixon

  War, Believe, Boys

  7 Copy quote

• Rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year with a warming of 3 or 4°C. There will be serious risks and increasing pressures for coastal protection in South East Asia (Bangladesh and Vietnam), small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and large coastal cities, such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Calcutta, Karachi, Buenos Aires, St. Petersburg, New York, Miami and London.

  Nicholas Stern

  New York, Islands, Years

  8 Copy quote

• Maybe it is the last chance for Europe to influence standards for world trade. Next it will be between the US and the Asia-Pacific region.

  Sigmar Gabriel

  Europe, Lasts, Next

  6 Copy quote

• Since the Bush-Cheney Administration took office in January 2001, controlling the major oil and natural gas fields of the world had been the primary, though undeclared, priority of US foreign policy... Not only the invasion of Iraq, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan, had nothing to do with 'democracy,' and everything to do with pipeline control across Central Asia and the militarization of the Middle East.

  F. William Engdahl

  Oil, Iraq, Office

  6 Copy quote

• The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends.

  J. William Fulbright

  Feelings, Excess, Causes

  J. William Fulbright (2011). “The Arrogance of Power”, p.32, Random House

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're interested in it because it would provide a land bridge up to Uzbekistan, which provides us, among other things, a humanitarian pathway for us to move supplies out of Central Asia and down into Afghanistan.

  Tommy Franks

  Moving, Land, Bridges

  "Why Mazar-e Sharif matters" by Ben Wedeman, David Grange, www.cnn.com. November 10, 2001.

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• This document will play an important role in protecting the strategic interests of Russia and Uzbekistan and ensuring stability and security in the region, which some politicians call Russia's soft underbelly. It's not a secret that after the Soviet collapse and especially in recent years, Central Asia has become the focus of interest of major nations because of its geographic location and rich mineral resources.

  Islom Karimov

  Russia, Years, Play

  8 Copy quote

• Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda, and the victims of this paralysis are the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

  Melinda Gates

  People, Birth Control, Agendas

  7 Copy quote

• Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided
  with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Wind, Oil, Sound

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty”, p.338, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• We rushed to Haiti. We Adopt in Asia. We empathize with Africa. But struggle to humanize our struggles here in the states.

  LeCrae

  Struggle, Haiti, States

  31 Copy quote

• We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Eight, Black

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

  John Hersey

  Girl, Morning, Past

  John Hersey (1946). “Hiroshima”

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• The military superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as we are tempted to think, and our superiority in civilization is a mere delusion.

  Bertrand Russell

  Military, Thinking, Europe

  Bertrand Russell (2007). “The Problem of China”, p.27, Cosimo, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about-slowly, ever so slowly-on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace.

  Robert Ardrey

  Father, Home, Lakes

  ROBERT ARDREY (1961). “AFRICAN GENISIS”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• The manly pride of the Romans, content with substantial power, had left to the vanity of the East the forms and ceremonies of ostentatious greatness. But when they lost even the semblance of those virtues which were derived from their ancient freedom, the simplicity of Roman manners was insensibly corrupted by the stately affectation of the courts of Asia.

  Edward Gibbon

  Pride, Greatness, Vanity

  Edward Gibbon (1875). “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.107

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light. It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.

  Simone Weil

  Religious, Heart, Son

  "Letter to a Priest". Book by Simone Weil, section 8, 1951.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think you can go back in history and look at what the effect in Asia and the world was of a divided, fractured China from, you know, the opium wars through the Chinese civil war, and I don't think it was pretty for Asia or the world.

  Dennis C. Blair

  War, Thinking, Chinese

  7 Copy quote

• I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020.

  John Mearsheimer

  Believe, Europe, Structure

  John J. Mearsheimer (2003). “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Updated Edition)”, p.402, W. W. Norton & Company

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• As the largest and most developed democracies of Asia (India and Japan), we have a mutual stake in each other's progress and prosperity.

  Manmohan Singh

  Japan, Democracy, Progress

  4 Copy quote