Asia's Quotes

#1. Between 1995 and 2009, Western Europe's entrepreneurs created jobs faster than the U.S. did, and European economies exported more than the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Eastern Europe's productivity increased more rapidly than East Asia's.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati

#2. Openness has been vital to Asia's fast growth in the past and it will continue to be crucial for the area's further development.

Li Keqiang

#3. I congratulate NUS for launching a new degree, a bachelor of environmental studies. This is a most timely initiative. One of the biggest challenges facing Asia is to reconcile Asia's rapid economic development with care for the environment.

Tommy Koh

#4. Asia's crowded and Europe's too old, Africa is far too hot and Canada's too cold. And South America stole our name, let's drop the big one.

Randy Newman

#5. As the leader of Southeast Asia's oldest democracy, I am always keen to share our experiences. In the half-century since independence, we have found that steady reform is the best way to secure lasting stability. It is a process that continues in Malaysia to this day.

Najib Razak

#6. The fund owns shares in over eight thousand companies, which effectively means that Norwegians own over 1 per cent of the world's listed companies, almost 2 per cent of Europe's and 0.7 per cent of Asia's.

Michael Booth

#7. For Fleur de Chine, I imagined the romantic and mysterious women from Asia's cinematic past-from the '30s femme fatale in a cheongsam and dark lipstick, to the'60s Hong Kong heroine of In the Mood for Love. I wanted to capture that fascinating, exquisite and slightly scandalous femininity.

Tom Ford

#8. In view of China's growing military strength and intentions, the best way to safeguard Asia's permanent peace and prosperity is to have all Asian countries join forces with other democratic countries in the world to form a global community of democracies.

Jim Costa

#9. All of the Chinese people, the Asian people say, "Oh Yao Ming, you are all the Chinese, all of Asia's hopes." That's a lot of pressure. I'm just a basketball player.

Yao Ming

#10. Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.

Paul Samuelson

#11. Maybe he was Filipino. Was that in Asia? Probably. Asia's out-of-control huge.

Rainbow Rowell

#12. In this century, the 21st century, the U.S. recognizes our prosperity and our security depends even more on the Asia-Pacific region.

Leon Panetta

#13. 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.

Dennis C. Blair

#14. I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

Mohsin Hamid

#15. In Asia, when people kiss each other they use the nose more than the mouth. Using the nose, we can recognize the person; it's so pleasant.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#16. Never silence your testimony. It's meant for someone else; not you.

Asia Mouzone

#17. We've seen progressive rock all over the world, in South America, Europe, Asia, across the US and North America and Australia. There's huge audiences for this stuff. For me it's always been there and it's just a matter of time before the people have more of the means to spread the word.

John Petrucci

#18. A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the 'mind of wonder.' There is not a lot of 'mind of wonder' writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that's what appeals to the readers who are my fans.

Tom Robbins

#19. 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.

Sellapan Ramanathan

#20. Any atrocity that's committed against one person affects us all, and we are becoming more of one society, of a global society, so something that happens in the Middle East or something that happens in Africa, something that happens in Asia, affects all of us.

Don Lemon

#21. Especially in the West, people want to understand Asia on a deeper level because it's become the engine of the world economy, like it or not.

Kevin Kwan

#22. I was in Asia and people asked me about being considered sex symbol. I don't know if that's good or not, because where I come from, sex isn't something you're allowed to talk about.

Bai Ling

#23. I think there will be linkages between the U.S. and Europe and I think there will be linkages between the U.S. and Asia; that is probably a little further off.

John Thain

#24. I'm the founder and CEO of Sama Group, a family of social enterprises - Samasource, Samahope and SamaUSA - that are working to alleviate poverty by connecting the global community to opportunity in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and here in the U.S.

Leila Janah

#25. Styx has their own style of music, and I think that's justifiable, the same way that Asia and Yes have had - Yes particularly has a unique style that seems to have transcended all styles of music for 43 years.

Geoff Downes

#26. A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the U.S. against a poor southeast Asian country was seen every night on television.

Tariq Ali

#27. You've got a global food problem. You've got a food problem in the United States. You've got a food problem in Africa ... in Asia. And so the truth is, the U.S. is going to have to produce more, on not very many more acres, honestly. And so we're going to have to do a better job.

Howard Graham Buffett

#28. Once Europe's colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization's primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century - just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.

Thomas P.M. Barnett

#29. We plan, we toil, we suffer - in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.

J.B. Priestley

#30. People's attitudes about sex aren't healthy anywhere, except maybe in those tribes where they go around naked.

Asia Argento

#31. Literacy in Tunisia is almost 100%. It's amazing - no country in the region or even in Asia can match Tunisia in education.

Mo Ibrahim

#32. There's no such thing as a favorite investment. But I think I tend to invest in Asia in promising countries, in equities, in real estate, and I own precious metals, obviously.

Marc Faber

#33. The evidence points to central Asia as man's original home, for the general movement of human migrations has been outward from that region and not inward.

Ellsworth Huntington

#34. I believe we have the potential to quadruple Australia's food exports to Asia.

Anthony Pratt

#35. As a major economic force worldwide, India and Indian companies have the opportunity to set the standards in Asia in terms of women's right to decent work.

Michelle Bachelet

#36. The fact that the Bush administration, and those in Europe who have followed its 9/11-inspired agenda, somehow believe that the future of the world is being played out in the Middle East and Central Asia rather than East Asia has only served to accelerate China's rise and the U.S.'s decline.

Martin Jacques

#37. The action star's life is very short. Back in Asia, I can do whatever I want to do. I'm the producer, I'm the director, I can do so many things, but in Hollywood any time I present a script they say: "No, no, no, Rush Hour 3, Rush Hour 4."

Jackie Chan

#38. VW's future is increasingly being decided in China, Russia, India, the Americas and Southeast Asia. This is where we will generate most of our growth in future.

Martin Winterkorn

#39. Perhaps the strongest signal of reengagement with Southeast Asia was the U.S.'s accession to the Southeast Asian Treaty of Amity and Cooperation.

Benigno Aquino III

#40. 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.

Nicolas Berggruen

#41. Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

Christopher Koch

#42. One doesn't have to invoke dominance to explain why Genghis Khan inseminated so many women that his Y chromosome is common in Central Asia today; it's enough to observe that he killed the women's fathers and husbands.

Steven Pinker

#43. I believe that democracies do not go to war; that's the lesson of history, and I think that a democratic Pakistan is the world community's best guarantee of stability in Asia.

Benazir Bhutto

#44. Competitiveness demands flexibility, choice and openness - or Europe will fetch up in a no-man's land between the rising economies of Asia and market-driven North America.

David Cameron

#45. It's a massive compliment to me to be known in Asia because Asia is the way forward in football, along with the Middle East. I believe that strongly.

Timothy F. Cahill

#46. Black glutinous rice works in both savoury and sweet dishes. It's a popular pudding rice in south-east Asia, where you'll often come across it cooked with water, coconut milk and a pandan leaf.

Yotam Ottolenghi

#47. Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile 'cigarette and sweets' stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway.

Jennifer S. Alderson

#48. On Jackie Kennedy's historic tour of India and Pakistan in 1962, she was photographed wearing sleeveless shifts and knee-length skirts - not to mention a midriff-baring sari that caused an international sensation. Public opinion seemed to have grown more conservative in South Asia since then.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#49. Vin Diesel is the best kisser in the world, better than anyone else I've ever had. The most attractive thing about Vin is his brain. That's his most attractive muscle.

Asia Argento

#50. I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.

Elon Musk

#51. From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.

Kenzaburo Oe

#52. Never Underestimate. Just as in any other negotiation, watching before acting is as important as listening before speaking. It's doubly important in China, however, where customs are time-honored and breaches of protocol not so quickly forgiven.

Irl M. Davis

#53. There are supply chains that exist in China and Asia now which the U.S. simply can't replicate.

Charles Duhigg

#54. The peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have common interest and are in the position to support each other in their anti-imperialist and anti-U.S. struggle. As long as Africa and Latin America are not free.

Kim Il-sung

#55. History shows that you can't - you can't have security in Southeast Asia without security in Northeast Asia. It's just the reality.

Jim Webb

#56. One-way monologues through the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia don't have much street cred with China's Internet generation, to be honest.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#57. Obviously over the years, it's been America, it's been Europe. It's all been very kind of divided between those two continents. It's nice to kind of see that Asia is starting - and especially China - starting to get recognized in this sport, too.

Kim Clijsters

#58. I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.

Elliott Abrams

#59. Since the web is totally worldwide, we need a set of behavioural rules, laws they are commonly called, that are accepted worldwide. There is a big difference as to how things are treated in the U.S. and Europe and Asia.

Robert Cailliau

#60. It is Japan's mission to be supreme in Asia, the South Seas and eventually the four corners of the world.

Sadao Araki

#61. When I hear people flatteringly say, 'You're an expert on East Asia ... ' I'm certainly an observer of East Asia, and central Asia, and ASEAN, and to a lesser extent South Asia and the Gulf, but there's always something behind the wall in China.

Jenny Shipley

#62. 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.

Nathan Wolfe

#63. Whether or not I can get an interview from hip-hop media, that's not going to effect whether or not I can go on tour in Asia and Europe and see all of these different places and experiences.

Le1f

#64. Hip hop has always been, for us, for artists who are pure to the craft - any place overseas, whether it's Australia, any place in Asia, Germany, Africa, it becomes something where you can still go and work. Hip hop is an import culture. We're spoiled by it here. It's homegrown.

Talib Kweli

#65. The U.S. has strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured. Holding Indochina is essential to securing these interests. Therefore, we must hold Indochina.

Noam Chomsky

#66. There's so much emphasis on the economic might of China, of Southeast Asia, Asian 'Super Tigers' and things like that. But nobody was really looking from the perspective of a family story, of these individuals.

Kevin Kwan

#67. Sadly, Asia never cared, with the unenviable consequence that today's Zuckerberg's brand, Facebook, enjoys more copyright and legal protection than the entire intellectual output of China in the last 3,000 years.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#68. I'm for fighting a war on terrorism, not a war in Southwest Asia that Alexander the Great couldn't win, the British Empire couldn't win, the Soviet Union couldn't win. That's stupid. It's a waste of resources; a waste of America's best and brightest.

Kurt Schrader

#69. Those of us lucky enough to fall in love with Asia know that it's an affair that's as long as it is resonant.

Hanya Yanagihara

#70. It's fashionable with the Sarah Palin set to attack Harvard and treat its graduates as elitists. But if you spend any time on campus, you see students drawn from all over the world - an astonishing number these days with roots in Asia - whose chief assets are brainpower and hard work.

David Ignatius

#71. 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

#72. My whole life's been stability. People who have worked with me have for a long time. Air Asia is the same people who started it.

Tony Fernandes

#73. I want to initiate a bilateral agenda that helps Mexico and the U.S. together compete with the world better, especially with the economies of Asia and the Pacific.

Enrique Pena Nieto

#74. We've supported the U.S. every step of the way. The Philippines was the first government in Asia after September 11, in fact, the night of September 11; it was nighttime for us then. It was daytime here. We were the first government in Asia to come out and say that we're supporting the U.S.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

#75. I have many golfer friends whom I play with, including my good friend Ian Poulter, a professional golfer who's coming to Asia to play in a few tournaments.

Heikki Kovalainen

#76. Seen from the United States or Europe, Iran's nuclear program often causes most concern, but from the perspective of countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the North Korean program is equally worrying.

Yukiya Amano

#77. Christianity is the fastest-growing religion in the world; Islam is the second. It's spreading in Asia, Africa, and South America. So the world is in a kind of religious revival, and the atheists are totally flummoxed. They thought they were winning, and now they see that they aren't.

Dinesh D'Souza

#78. If the early Christian accounts of dramatic signs make these works seem foreign and foreboding to segments of modern Western academia,[85] they are nevertheless welcome in many of the dynamic churches of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which believe that they share their experiences.

Craig S. Keener

#79. The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.

Jose Saramago

#80. Over to the Asia Society, and now she's out doing a bit of Christmas shopping. She says you, ah, you're meeting her later tonight?

Donna Tartt

#81. Long after this wonderful event in the Earth's history, when the human species was spread over a good deal of Asia, Europe, and Africa, migration to the American continents began in attempts to find new feeding grounds and unoccupied areas for hunting and fishing.

Harry Johnston

#82. Americans easily forget that the air they breathe is the same as those in Europe or Africa or Asia; it's the same air as Jesus breathed. I would like them to remember that connection.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

#83. Since ancient times, people from throughout Asia have brought to Japan their talents, knowledge and energy, helping to lay the basis for Japan's existence as a country.

Daisaku Ikeda

#84. Britain's unique success as an industrialised nation-state prompted strong imitative endeavours not only across Europe, but also in Asia. Now many people, who were once humiliated into a sense of nationality by British rule, loom larger than their former masters.

Pankaj Mishra

#85. Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Never fight a battle of wits when iocane powder is involved. And never, never, never, never, never, never, never let the New Republic's editors choose the headline for your article.

Brad De Long

#86. It's kind of scary sometimes, I've seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music.

Michael Tilson Thomas

#87. The experience of the '90s, whether it's the '94 peso crisis or the '97 crisis in Asia, the '98 crisis, even the 2001 crisis, is that we recovered pretty readily. There wasn't great consequence.

Myron Scholes

#88. I play video games and watch TV, but there's more to life than that. Faxing and the Internet have created a global community. The kid next door has become the kid in Latin America or Asia.

Craig Kielburger

#89. In Asia, it's customary to get together with your entire extended family on a regular basis, and it's all rife with politics.

Kevin Kwan

#90. Although I still have a long way to go, I would like to become the pride of Asia. When another Asian artist enters the U.S. market, I would like him to think, 'There was an artist called Rain who succeeded in the U.S. market.' This is my dream.

Rain

#91. It's beyond belief that any Australian could be so stupid as to carry drugs into any country in Asia.

John Howard

#92. 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

#93. Historically, epics are set in Africa or Asia or the Wild West, but if you make an epic today it's hard to disassociate from the contemporary realities of those places.

Baz Luhrmann

#94. I ended up in the back seat of a chicken truck's cab heading through beautiful scenery and disastrous roads to my hotel. About an hour later, we stopped to sell a few hundred of the chickens to a butcher shop.

Jennifer S. Alderson

#95. Western theology invariably asks the question: Are miracles possible? This of course addresses the Enlightenment problem of a closed universe. In much of Asia that is a non-question because the miraculous is assumed and fairly regularly experienced. - Hwa Yung

Craig S. Keener

#96. In Asia, it is very hectic - there is no overtime, no holidays, no weekends. It's pretty rushed because they are trying to cut the deadline.

Godfrey Gao

#97. Lear's daughters and their loathsome husbands are all deservedly slaughtered for their ill treatment of an aged ruler (one of the reasons that tragedy remains so huge in Asia)

Boris Johnson

#98. I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had thought me that.

Pearl S. Buck

#99. There aren't many people who say that Europe is a territory, or Asia is a territory - it'd be suicide. And there are even more people in America than in Europe. I think it's strange, really. I basically see it as loads of different places.

Sean Booth

#100. All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

Paul Theroux