East Asia Quotes

1. "Turkey is a European country, an Asian country, a Middle Eastern country, Balkan country, Caucasian country, neighbor to Africa, Black Sea country, Caspian Sea, all these."
Author: Ahmet Davutoglu

2. "Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be."
Author: Anthony Bourdain

3. "For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.' As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock."
Author: Carl Sagan

4. "Southeast Asia is an area in which there is a form of Islam which is both devout and progressive, and therefore to be supported. It's an area in which I see a congruence of American interests and local interests: to have tolerant societies and become more prosperous."
Author: Dennis C. Blair

5. "Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees."
Author: E.F. Schumacher

6. "In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called "meddah. " They would go to coffee houses, where they would tell a story in front of an audience, often improvising. With each new person in the story, the meddah would change his voice, impersonating that character. Everybody could go and listen, you know ordinary people, even the sultan, Muslims and non-Muslims. Stories cut across all boundaries. Like "The Tales of Nasreddin Hodja," which were very popular throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and Asia. Today, stories continue to transcend borders"
Author: Elif Shafak

7. "Scriitorul trebuie sa fie un martor incoruptibil al timpului sau, cu curajul de a spune adevarul si de a se ridica impotriva autoritatii oficiale care, orbita de interesele proprii, pierde din vedere sacralitatea fiintei umane. El trebuie sa se pregateasca pentru a-si asuma ceea ce etimologia cuvantului "martor" ii arata: martiriul. Anevoios este drumul care il asteapta: cei puternici il vor califica drept comunist pentru ca pretinde dreptate pentru cei sarmani si infometati; comunistii il vor eticheta drept reactionar pentru ca reclama libertate si respect pentru persoana. In aceasta teribila dualitate va trai sfasiat si indurerat, dar va trebui sa se apere cu unghiile si cu dintii."
Author: Ernesto Sabato

8. "A few scattered accounts, collected and combined together, may lead us to two certain conclusions: 1. That all the American Indians are one kind of people; 2. That they are the same as the people in the northeast of Asia."
Author: Ezra Stiles

9. "As soon as the news of the Cabot voyages reached the King of Portugal he arranged to send an expedition of discovery to the far north-west, perhaps to find a northern sea route to Eastern Asia."
Author: Harry Johnston

10. "Brunei Darussalam is one of the oldest kingdoms in South East Asia."
Author: Hassanal Bolkiah

11. "The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia."
Author: Hideki Tojo

12. "China pays a great deal of attention to the Korean nuclear issue. We stand for achieving denuclearization of the peninsula in a peaceful way through dialogue and consultation to maintain peace and stability of the peninsula and Northeast Asia."
Author: Hu Jintao

13. "I lowered my hands to try to save from disorder the arrangement of the tleaves and flowers; meanwhile, she was also dealing with the branches, leaning forward; and so it happened that at the very moment when one of my hands slipped in confusion between Madame Miyagi's kimono and her bare skin and found itself clasping a soft and warm breast, elongated in form, one of the lady's hands, from among the branches keiyaki [translator's note: in Europe called Caucasian elm], had reached my member and was holding it in a firm, frank grasp, drawing it from my garments as if she were performing the operation of stripping away leaves."
Author: Italo Calvino

14. "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."
Author: J. William Fulbright

15. "It was good to launch the economy in the '50s. Japan did this; China did this; even South Korea did this. All the East Asians did this - import substitution. I think all countries followed import substitution in the '50s and in the '60s, but I think by the '70s, countries were getting out of that first phase of the strategy."
Author: Jairam Ramesh

16. "Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?"
Author: Jean Jacques Rousseau

17. "If you currently travel abroad or plan to in the future, make sure you understand the cultural convention of the country that you are visiting. Particularly with regard to greetings. If someone gives you a weak hand-shake, don't grimace. If anyone takes your arm, don't wince. If you are in the Middle East and a person wants to hold your hand, hold it. If you are a man visiting Russia, don't be surprised when your male host kisses your cheek, rather than hand. All of these greetings are as natural as way to express genuine sentiments as an American handshake. I am honored when an Arab or Asian man offers to take my hand because I know that it is a sign of high respect and trust. Accepting these cultural differences is the first step to better understanding and embracing diversity."
Author: Joe Navarro

18. "In Southeast Asia the world is understood to be a vast, complex network of interdependent relationships. So when global capitalism makes it impossible for small-time rice farmers to feed their families and make a living, it is a natural thing for anyone in the family who can find an alternative source of income to do so."
Author: John Burdett

19. "Unification is one thing, and stability in Northeast Asia is another thing."
Author: Kim Dae Jung

20. "But all that's hugely unlikely -- with the exception of mosquito bites and sunburn. And yet even experienced travelers are still afraid. "What everyone forgets -- even me -- is the people who actually live here. In places like Central America, I mean. Southeast Asia. India. Africa. Millions, even billions, of people, who live out their whole lives in these places -- the places so many people like us fear. Think about it: they ride chicken buses to work every day. Their clothes are always damp. Their whole lives, they never escape the dust and the heat. But they deal with all these discomforts. They have to."So why can't travelers? If we've got the means to get here, we owe it to the country we're visiting not to treat it like an amusement park, sanitized for our comfort. It's insulting to the people who live here. People just trying to have the best lives they can, with the hands they've been dealt."
Author: Kirsten Hubbard

21. "And the peanut butter-eaters on Earth were preparing to conquer the shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time, the Earthlings hadn't just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again.They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping, and determined that they were too numerous and proud and resourceful ever to allow themselves to be pioneered.So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the majority in very respect.Then the Earthling armored space ships came and discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the pioneering began."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

22. "So much of our attention is trained on the Middle East these days, but we cannot ignore East Asia."
Author: Lee H. Hamilton

23. "The Indian economy grew at 5.5 percent, but if you look at the last 30 years - for example, 1960 to 1985 - the progress made by East Asian countries was phenomenal. In a single generation they had been able to transform the character of their economy. They were able to get rid of chronic poverty."
Author: Manmohan Singh

24. "Because pandemics almost always begin with the transmission of an animal microbe to a human, it's work that takes me all around the globe - from rain forest hunting camps of central Africa to wild animal markets of east Asia."
Author: Nathan Wolfe

25. "By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese."
Author: Neal Ascherson

26. "L.A. is very special to me, so far away from my world on the East Coast, Europe, Asia. It's a bit of an island for me - less intense, less busy; because of time difference and location, it has a calming effect. At least it used to be all that."
Author: Nicolas Berggruen

27. "John Foster Dulles had called on me in his capacity as Secretary of State, and he had exhausted every argument to persuade me to place Cambodia under the protection of the South East Asia Treaty Organization."
Author: Norodom Sihanouk

28. "I will try to work for greater reconciliation, cooperation and peace in North East Asia based on correct perception of history."
Author: Park Geun Hye

29. "Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this."
Author: Peter Agre

30. "First, you have stereotypes, and that will be the black drug dealer, the east Asian kung fu master, the Middle Eastern terrorist in 'True Lies.' Then you have stuff that takes place on culturally specific terrain, that engages with it, but actually subverts assumptions. 'Smashes' stereotypes. That's where I've come into the game."
Author: Riz Ahmed

31. "The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,The blue pool in the old garden,More than five thousand years has drunk sacrificeOf ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfsNor any future world-quarrel of westeringAnd eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the grey sea-smokeInto pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulgingEyeball of water, arched over to Asia,Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleepingEye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars."
Author: Robinson Jeffers

32. "88. People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I've been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it's the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris."
Author: Roman Payne

33. "I had siblings from South Asia, from East Asia, from depressed communities around America, and you know, we'd have long conversations."
Author: Ronan Farrow

34. "You are slowly developing some multinationals of your own. We certainly hope that some of them will look in this direction when they look for opportunities because the progress of Southeast Asia is important to China, just as China's progress is important to us."
Author: Sellapan Ramanathan

35. "The direct investment of Japanese businesses to East Asian economies accelerates the reallocation of their production bases. Consequently, between Japan and the other East Asian countries, both exports and imports are growing substantially."
Author: Toshihiko Fukui

36. "East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century."
Author: William Kirby

37. "In fact, it struck me when we invaded last year that if we did it without European and East Asian support, we were risking losing our alliance in Europe in exchange for Iraq, and that is a very undesirable exchange."
Author: William Odom

38. "In the end, we lost IndoChina to the communists. But we did not lose Southeast Asia."
Author: William Westmoreland

39. "I think it is not necessary at this time to put forth a grand vision such as an East Asian Community. What we must do before that is create scenarios for Japan's response in case of a serious territorial incident."
Author: Yoshihiko Noda

40. "I remain fundamentally optimistic aboutWall Street as a marketplace and as a vehicle for wealth creation. Itsfuture will rightly depend on several variables, chief among thembeing human choices; whether they be rationally, emotionally, subjectivelyor objectively made. Financial engineering taught us that ifit could be quantified, it could be qualified. We learned about howto use leverage and have abused that knowledge for a myriad ofreasons. We became practitioners of the transaction-based model, but forgot that long before the abacus there was trust and integrity,anchors of relationship-based models common with Middle East andAsian markets. It goes back to a handshake, the first and enduringexample of mutual consensus."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

East Asia Quotes Pictures