"…There are numerous sensitive subjects in China, and writers there have to make decisions about how they’re going to create in these conditions. The resulting literature is fascinating, full of docu-fiction, allegory, and everything in-between…"

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“It’s one of those places you can never quite see enough of it, it’s vast. For the Chinese it’s very odd for people to travel alone so I often get picked up by families and couples. You learn a lot from what people don’t tell you.”

“My mother used to say that my tones are all crooked: it’s like hearing a song sung out of tune.”

“…Language is fragile. Words can erase and distort so many things. Justice, reason, democracy, freedom, goodness, truth—we have used these words in the service of widely different intentions. We have used them in humane ways and in deeply violent ways…”

Resonant Thoughts

"There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic …"

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mathematics1960

#books

"It is not possible to procure religiousness through governments; that can only be made possible with the system of the Mahdi. The system, the spirit that would come about in religiousness is love. I m…"

— Adnan Oktar

Religion1956

#love

"Mr. Honda would always give me complete control over the score. Even though he was very knowledgeable about music, he would always say to me, "Mr. Ifukube, I know very little about music, so I'll allo…"

— Akira Ifukube

Music1914–2006

#knowledge

"In the past there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from huma…"

— Yuval Noah Harari

Literature1976

#time