Top 100 A Chinese Quotes
#1. I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.
Jung Chang
#2. 'Suits' fans. I've never met a more diverse audience: across gender, race, class. It's incredible. People who are high-powered lawyers to doormen. A Chinese immigrant cable installer - who barely spoke English - loves 'Suits!'
David Costabile
#3. I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village.
Pankaj Mishra
#4. Many simple peoples feared the exceptional individual as a disintegrating force; there is a Chinese proverb that "the great man is a public misfortune.
Will Durant
#5. Her god is just like a Chinese parent, never running out of excuses to love a son.
Yiyun Li
#6. In my school days, everyone thought I'm too tall for a Chinese girl.
Liu Wen
#7. A Chinese tale tells of some men sent to harm a young girl who, upon seeing her beauty, become her protectors rather than her violators. That's how I felt seeing the Earth for the first time. I could not help but love and cherish her.
Taylor Wang
#8. [A]nything served in a Chinese restaurant is Kosher, even pork.
from The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals
Duff Goldman
#9. Most Western journalists in China prefer a Chinese-free international language, and thus bend over backwards to replace important Chinese terms with Western vocabularies.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#10. Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
Randall Jarrell
#11. There's a Chinese principle called yuanfen, which means your fate with someone else [...] Two people with strong yuanfen have a greater chance of meeting in their lifetimes, and can become as close as family.
Stacey Lee
#12. Imagine fighting for a country where the only civilian you know is a Chinese laundryman!
Kurt Vonnegut
#13. You see, calling things by their proper names is the beginning of wisdom. That's a Chinese proverb and they invented writing. The wisdom, in case you're wondering, is that when you get names right, you narrow the gap between you and the thing.
Zia Haider Rahman
#14. The ramparts of Vienna are crumbling into the sand; no one wants to live so confined, however, the entire country is already surrounded by a Chinese wall!
Franz Grillparzer
#15. At the circus, a careless mother may let her child take part in the experiments of a Chinese magician. He puts him in a box. He opens the box; it's empty. He closes it again. He opens it; the child reappears and goes back to his seat. Now it is no longer the same child. Nobody doubts it.
Jean Cocteau
#16. I'll give you a great example of an issue that no one brought up during this Florida primary, the fact that we're going to have a Chinese made oil rig put in place about 60 miles off the coast of Florida.
Allen West
#17. If I were a Chinese dissident, I'd be grateful that Cisco had helped bring the Internet to China, but I'd also be outraged that Cisco may have helped the cops keep me under surveillance and catch me trying to organize protest activities.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#18. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Tom Stoppard
#19. I was born in Brooklyn, delivered by a Chinese doctor on a table in a boarding house on Sept. 23, 1920.
Mickey Rooney
#20. The old junky has found a vein ... blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower ... he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with the sweet nutty smell of young male lust.
William S. Burroughs
#21. If you don't have a bed, or a dresser or a wall, or a book or a toy you are oppressed. An African American in a white world. A Jew in a Christian world. A gypsy. A Native American. A Chinese American. Let's say, you were born deprived.
Gerald Stern
#22. My experiences growing up in both a Chinese American household and the Catholic Church define much of who I am.
Gene Luen Yang
#23. Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today, a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.
Tom Lantos
#24. One has to keep in mind the countless human tragedies that played out in these days. Through the middle of a city, where several thousand connections existed daily, despite administrative division, the concrete pillars were driven into the border, which was expanded like a Chinese wall.
Willy Brandt
#25. There's a Chinese saying that the fates are winds that blow through our lives from every angle, urging us along the paths of time.
Anonymous
#26. I got a custom-made silk dress from a Chinese tailor for really cheap. I sketched it out on a piece of paper, and they took my measurements and made the dress for me in a day!
Alicia Sacramone
#27. Dawn Madden's got cruel eyes like a Chinese empress and sometimes one glimpse at school makes me think about her all day.
David Mitchell
#28. Look at the truth from how it stands, not where it comes from. The truth is still the truth no matter whether it is spoken by an Indian, an American, a Chinese, an European, an African or an Australian!
Israelmore Ayivor
#29. For years, I looked to Bruce Lee as a mentor as being a Chinese and Asian man living in this country.
Donnie Yen
#30. I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.
P. J. O'Rourke
#31. Never eat at a Chinese restaurant named Mama Teresa's Trattoria.
Joy Behar
#32. There's a Chinese saying: "The first part that rots is the head." It really does. I've seen it.
Thomas Bidegain
#33. Perhaps he found it strange being accompanied by a Chinese-Nigerian arms trafficking pirate, but the Irish priest had just followed me silently on board the covert government transport.
Dayo Ntwari
#34. Clouds and Rain' is a Chinese euphemism for sex. 'The Bringer of Clouds and Rain' is a lady of the night, a prostitute,
Zahra Owens
#35. In our street everybody knows everybody's business. Someone will notice I rode up and walked down. Over fences and through keyholes, your business can pass like a Chinese whisper and beat you home, even if you're running.
Vikki Wakefield
#36. I think one of the problems when we discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict is people talk too much in terms of, 'What's your preference?,' like politics is a Chinese menu - I'll take one from column A and two from column B. That's not what politics is about.
Norman Finkelstein
#37. In the rural South, 'Bubba' is like how people say 'dude' in California. It's a name for a regular Southern man. I know a Chinese Bubba, a black Bubba.
Bubba Sparxxx
#38. Broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable; in fact, it is originally an Italian vegetable. It was introduced into the United States in the 1800s, but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s.
Jennifer Lee
#39. There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, "How shall we escape the heat?" - meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, "Go right into the middle of the fire." "But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?" "No further pain will trouble you!
Alan W. Watts
#40. In 1989, a lone and still-anonymous Chinese student stood unarmed in front of a Chinese tank and gave the world an enduring image of the determination of China's young to change their nation. He didn't text message the tank or share a video on YouTube.
Tom Brokaw
#41. Bruce Lee was the first star I idolized. Growing up as a Chinese American, there weren't many people like me on the big screen.
Daniel Wu
#42. Club Med is very suitable for a Chinese lifestyle.
Guo Guangchang
#43. You may baptize as long as you want, but the Jew remains a Jew, the Chinese a Chinese and the Negro a Negro.
Julius Streicher
#44. The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period.
Brian Aldiss
#45. But in the end, he's just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.
Wes Anderson
#46. Selective Biblical quotation is a favorite of leftists who interpret the Bible the same way they do the Constitution: as a Chinese menu designed to allow picking and choosing. That's because when many Democrats take the Bible as a whole, they realize how much they despise it.
Ben Shapiro
#48. Navarette, a Chinese missionary, agrees with Leibniz and says that It is the special providence of God that the Chinese did not know what was done in Christendom; for if they did, there would be never a man among them, but would spit in our faces.
Matthew Tindal
#49. I tried therapy. This had never appealed to me. For me, it was a bit like a Chinese meal: very filling at the time, but then an hour later you're hungry again.
Rod Stewart
#50. I grew up in a Chinese family where the parents' No. 1 priority is the kids' education.
Weili Dai
#51. I had a meal last night. I ordered everything in French, surprised everybody. It was a Chinese restaurant. I said to this Chinese waiter, 'Look, this chicken I got here is cold.' He said, 'It should be, it's been dead two weeks.'
Tommy Cooper
#52. If you watch a Chinese movie with subtitles, it's just like watching an Arabic movie with Chinese subtitles. That explains why you can't take Chinese language movies and expect them to go abroad.
Bruno Zheng Wu
#53. A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life.
John Pomfret
#54. Just because I have rice on my clothes doesn't mean I've been to a wedding. A Chinese man threw up on me.
Phyllis Diller
#55. Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.
Haruki Murakami
#56. I don't mind doing action or kung fu, but I'm also really happy to do something dramatic. I'd like to show that a Chinese girl doesn't have to do crazy martial arts to get the part.
Zhu Zhu
#57. Last night I ordered a whole meal in French. Even the waiter was amazed - it was a Chinese restaurant!
Henny Youngman
#58. When I went to London, they told me I spoke with a funny accent - English with a Chinese accent.
Jean-Georges Vongerichten
#59. I consulted a Chinese herbalist and spent two weeks on an island off the coast of Zanzibar. I was away from any kind of contemporary technology.
Francesca Annis
#60. I don't believe Chinese movies should only have Chinese cast and talents shooting it with a Chinese story.
Bruno Zheng Wu
#61. This year, everything is going to be different. No one in Fischer Hall is going to die this year. Not even accidentally."
"How are you going to manage that?" Coop asks, gnawing on a Chinese sparerib. "Bubble wrap all your residents?
Meg Cabot
#62. For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.
Lin Yutang
#63. When we rise in the morning ... at the table we drink coffee which is provided to us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African; before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#64. I think it would be really fun to film a drama in a foreign country. If the opportunity presents itself, I want to film a Chinese production.
Lee Min-ho
#65. The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.
Jimmy Wales
#66. Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant!
Elena Kagan
#67. A Chinese proverb says, "Those who drink the water must remember those who dug the well." Gratitude is one of the most attractive of all personal attributes;
John C. Maxwell
#68. You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat.
Ella Maillart
#69. He told me that while he was in a Chinese Communist gulag for almost eighteen years, he faced danger on a few occasions. I thought he was referencing a threat to his own life. But when I asked, "What danger?" he answered, "Losing compassion toward the Chinese.
Dalai Lama XIV
#70. I had no idea what I was gonna do after I got my degree in philosophy in 1940. But what I did know was at that time, if you were a Chinese-American, even department stores wouldn't hire you. They'd come right out and say, 'We don't hire Orientals.'
Grace Lee Boggs
#71. In the words of a Chinese proverb, "The wind always destroys the tallest tree in the forest.
Chai Ling
#73. Lighting some fine incense and then lying down alone to sleep. Looking into a Chinese mirror that's a little clouded.
Sei Shonagon
#74. There is credible evidence that a Chinese fleet went as far as the coast of Africa, in present-day Kenya. It was the largest maritime fleet in the world, under the command of Zheng He, a favorite of the emperor.
Russell Freedman
#75. Visiting Future World is like opening a Chinese fortune cookie to read, "Soon you'll be finished with dinner."
P. J. O'Rourke
#76. Haier, a Chinese brand, exemplifies the trend of emerging market companies building brands that are being accepted, if not recognized, by the Western consumer.
Nirmalya Kumar
#77. When I read 'Dream of Red Mansions,' I was really struck by the fact that it was built differently from a lot of genre works. Specifically, a lot of the events that should have taken centre-stage - wars, social upheavals - were seen entirely through the eyes of the women of a Chinese household.
Aliette De Bodard
#78. In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'.
Paul Johnson
#79. Americans believe that you can alter people by conversion, and that everybody in the world is a potential American. The Chinese also believe that their values are universal, but they do not believe that you can convert to becoming a Chinese unless you are born into it.
Henry A. Kissinger
#80. ... now a Chinese Fire Drill is just mildly offensive slang denoting a chaotic and unproductive situation like most police calls handled by more than two cops. Those I really try to avoid. Hey, screw it. I'm no hero.
A.J. Hoover
#81. They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.
Sherman Alexie
#82. We got a Chinese Elvis painted by Norman Rockwell.
Steve Hackett
#83. Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I'd first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I thought his tactics were dirty and when I shouted as much, he came over & forced me to retract.
Pete Townshend
#84. Never forget a man who holds a secret holds power. A Chinese proverb says: "If women want to keep a secret, one of them must die." What a splendid prospect, I thought! So far I have not heard one single encouraging word about this job.
John Eppler
#85. The difference between being Mexican and being Chinese, as I can see it, is that when you go to Harvard from a Chinese family, the whole family goes to Harvard. When you're a Mexican and you go to Harvard, you betray the family.
Richard Rodriguez
#86. The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.
Henry A. Kissinger
#87. While filming 'The Matrix,' we studied how a Chinese fight-choreography team trains actors before production starts so that they can participate in action sequences in a more dynamic way.
David Leitch
#88. To quote Shirley Polanski, head waitress at the Humdinger Diner: "Beware of a big man whose stomach doesn't move when he laughs."
I think a Chinese philosopher said it first, but these things trickle down to the food service community.
Joan Bauer
#89. In 2025, don't be surprised if a Chinese flag is placed on the moon.
Michio Kaku
#90. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.
Edward Snowden
#91. Paul Bearer has more chins than a Chinese phone book!
Jerry Lawler
#92. In 1918, a Chinese immigrant working in a Los Angeles noodle factory invented the fortune cookie. He did so believing that a cookie with a positive message in it would raise the spirits of the city's poor.
James Frey
#93. Ox, at an early age a Chinese genius gazes at the path that lies ahead and reaches for a wine jar," Master Li said. "Is it any wonder that our greatest men have lurched rather than walked across the landscape as they hiccuped their way into history?
Barry Hughart
#94. I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It's chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.
Paul Simon
#95. Product investment, quality management, and all the things that are key for a car company - great, there has been no compromise in those aspects. But I feel there's a lot we could do on communication, particularly from a Chinese perspective.
Li Shufu
#96. In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.
Gene Luen Yang
#97. Remember, sex is like a Chinese dinner. It ain't over 'til you both get your cookie.
Alec Baldwin
#98. Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.
Evan Osnos
#99. My heart is a weatherballoon caught in an updraft of a chinese tax percentage, the tax percentages are unequivocaaaaaaaaaal, Unequivocaaaaaaaaal. This is the sort of lyrics you could never think of, loser. Here's a razorblade go cut yourself
Thom Yorke
#100. On a Chinese film you just give orders, no one questions you. Here, you have to convince people, you have to tell them why you want to do it a certain way, and they argue with you. Democracy.
Ang Lee
