Quotes About Beijing

#1. President Obama is in China now for an economic summit in Beijing. The president wore a traditional purple silk shirt along with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. That's after they taught Putin how to put a shirt ON.

Jimmy Fallon

#2. I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.

Ma Jian

#3. You walk into the playgrounds in Shanghai and Beijing, and you see youngsters who are shorter, shaking and baking and having attitude. And Jeremy Lin is going to inspire all of them.

David Stern

#4. The Olympics brought a lot of development to Beijing, but I don't see that there have been any changes to human rights as a result of the Olympics.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#5. Beijing residents joke that to get a free smoke all they have to do is open their windows!

Lee Hsien Loong

#6. The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can't breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.

Joe Biden

#7. When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.

Evan Osnos

#8. Just as we take a train to get to Beijing or Manhattan, we take death to reach a star.

David Paul Kirkpatrick

#9. I used to see Estee Lauder's ads everywhere in the subways of Beijing, and I thought how wonderful it would be if the model on them was myself!

Liu Wen

#10. In societies where men are truly confident of their own worth, women are not merely tolerated but valued.
(From a speech read on video on August 31, 1995 before the NGO Forum on Women, Beijing, China)

Aung San Suu Kyi

#11. In Beijing, the joke among hacks is that, after the drive in from the airport, you are ready to write a column; after a month, you feel the stirrings of an idea-book; but after a year, you struggle to write anything at all, because you've finally discovered just how much you don't know.

Evan Osnos

#12. ...the government in Beijing continues to define itself as Marxist-Leninist, though 'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt.

Francis Wheen

#13. The Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures.

Evan Osnos

#14. Squash has the credentials to become an olympic event and our goal is to see the sport in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. We are working towards this and will keep trying even if our bid is not successful.

Jahangir Khan

#15. The world awaits Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Olympics, an occasion which will bring into the global spotlight the dramatic advances China is making in enhancing the quality of life for its people.

Alexander Haig

#16. As a student in Beijing in 1996, I sometimes marveled at the sheer obscurity of the movies that somehow made it onto pirated discs in China.

Evan Osnos

#17. In the States, you can buy Chinese food. In Beijing you can buy hamburger. It's very close. Now I feel the world become a big family, like a really big family. You have many neighbors. Not like before, two countries are far away.

Jet Li

#18. In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.

Ma Jian

#19. I've had meetings with Fidel Castro. I've had meetings with Kim Il-Sung. I've had meetings with other dictators. I've met with the Butcher of Beijing. You know, I think it's important to hear, you know, each other's perspective.

Gary Ackerman

#20. The heaviest snowfall in over 60 years is being reported in Beijing, China. To give you an idea of how bad it is, the army is now using snowplows to run over dissidents.

Jay Leno

#21. 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

#22. In all my time in Beijing, I'd never managed to have a female friend. It seemed every woman in this city was busy either with her kids or with her mortgage.

Xiaolu Guo

#23. I went to Beijing for the Olympics and was literally right across the track from Usain Bolt. And when he gets to full stride, for every two steps the other guy's taking, he's just taking one.

Wendell Pierce

#24. My approach to gymnastics in Beijing was heavily based on the amount of difficulty I could do.

Shawn Johnson

#25. At certain historic moments, grandparents took on childrearing responsibilities. In many cultures, they still do. Chinese grandparents who are able to retire at 55 are seen all over Beijing bouncing grandbabies. In the United States, we can't afford to retire at 55.

Erica Jong

#26. Beijing didn't go the way I planned and I would have liked to have performed a little bit better personally. After Beijing that is what stuck in my mind. I want a better Olympic finish.

Alicia Sacramone

#27. Beijing would indeed consider vetoing any American effort to sanction Iran at the Security Council.

Li Zhaoxing

#28. Beijing? Freedom? Oil and water.

Victor Robert Lee

#29. During the six years I spent writing my novel 'The Incarnations,' I lived in seven cities in four countries. I moved in and out of 17 different houses and flats in Beijing, Seoul, Colorado, Boston, Leeds, Washington D.C., London and Shenzhen.

Susan Barker

#30. I was still young when I missed Beijing. I was favourite to win a medal but I knew I had time. My coach advised me to stay at school and finish my exams. Even if I had gone and won the Olympics, I might not have handled the pressure. So I moved on.

David Rudisha

#31. People in China criticized President Obama for chewing gum while entering the economic summit in Beijing. They're saying he looked like a rapper. Then again, to be fair, in China I look like a rapper.

Conan O'Brien

#32. To win more medals at Beijing is just fantastic, and British cycling has come a huge way in the last few years.

Bradley Wiggins

#33. The obvious precedent for Beijing 2008 was the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Both were showcases for a muscle-flexing nation, although Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights.

Anthony Lane

#34. The Beijing Olympics represent China's grand entrance onto the world stage and confirmation of its new superpower status.

Ma Jian

#35. China should be another United States from an economic standpoint. Beijing should be another Silicon Valley.

Marc Andreesen

#36. When Hillary was First Lady, we went to the Beijing Women's Conference. She courageously stood up and spoke out on behalf of human rights and women's rights, inspiring millions to fight for a better future.

Madeleine Albright

#37. Team GB's success at the Beijing Olympics can, in part, be said to have been made in Manchester. For example, all the cycling medal winners trained at Manchester's velodrome, the National Cycling Centre.

Lucy Powell

#38. We sincerely ask the Beijing authorities across the Strait to view the election result from a positive perspective, to accept the democratic decision of the Taiwanese people.

Chen Shui-bian

#39. In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission.

Evan Osnos

#40. I went to China for a brief working visit, and I thought that Shanghai was interesting, but Beijing totally grabbed me.

Marcus Brigstocke

#41. Our policy for the last many years has been to deter the Chinese government in Beijing from ever coming into the position where they thought they had enough leverage over the U.S. to cross the Straits of Taiwan.

Bob Filner

#42. Beijing's preferred method of control, in Russia as in Africa, has been legal contracts on terms advantageous to itself.

Timothy Snyder

#43. I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.

Betty Friedan

#44. I was born and raised in Vancouver. I moved to Beijing in 2010 just before the Olympics. Being an Asian Canadian actor, the amount of opportunity at the time was slim to none. I made the decision to go to China, and it was one of the best decisions of my life.

Osric Chau

#45. Our real debt ceiling isn't decided by Washington; it's decided by Beijing.

David Burge

#46. Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging, the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the Indians, for their part, view the Chinese in similar Mahanian terms.

Robert D. Kaplan

#47. When Richard Nixon came to Beijing in the winter of 1972, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, so it had a limited array of entertainment to provide.

Evan Osnos

#48. Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954; he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics.

Pico Iyer

#49. It took years, honestly, to deal with the disappointment of Beijing.

Ryan Hall

#50. Beijing was such a different city. There were so few cars, I could walk in the middle of the road. In the summer, the streetlamps attracted swirling bugs. I loved those bugs: crickets, praying mantis, all kinds of beetles. I also have a vivid memory of dazzling sunlight coming out of the sky.

Ma Jun

#51. Edward Snowden may not be a Chinese mole, but he might as well be. He's just handed Beijing a major score, while the NSA struggles to pick up the pieces - and the rest of us pay the price in terms of future national security.

Arthur L. Herman

#52. I left Beijing in the late 1980s to live in Hong Kong because, having been blacklisted by the government, I couldn't publish my works on the mainland.

Ma Jian

#53. Like students going to school, the planes on their bombing missions fly over Beijing each morning. And each time I hear their engines attack the air I feel a certain slight tension, as if I were witnessing the invasion of Death, though this heightens my consciousness of the existence of Life.

Lu Xun

#54. On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. "Goddamnit," I whispered. "I knew I forgot something.

David Sedaris

#55. I have a lot of bitter memories from Beijing. Hopefully, we can erase those memories and bring the gold back to Japan.

Kohei Uchimura

#56. You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can't visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally,

Barack Obama

#57. Beijing is my favorite city in China.

Andrew Lau

#58. If we're going to be sneaking into New Beijing Palace while Levana is there, why don't we just assassinate her?

Marissa Meyer

#59. Mao had decided to make the city his new capital, and he had its name changed from Peking to Beijing.

Anchee Min

#60. No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.

Thomas Friedman

#61. In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.

Evan Osnos

#62. My goal is to get on the national team. People joke that we'll be able to go to Beijing in 2008, but it's just jokes right now. Hopefully I'll be able to make it a reality.

Lindsay Thompson

#63. The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.

Henry A. Kissinger

#64. When I see someone from Beijing owning 50 houses in Auckland I don't think that's neo-racist

Winston Peters

#65. Air pollution is my biggest concern right now. Maybe because I live in Beijing, and in this city we have such severe challenges due to bad air quality. It has affected our daily lives and health. I do not go outdoors because of it. I desperately hope that we can improve the current situation.

Li Bingbing

#66. While Google no longer has a search engine operation inside China, it has maintained a large presence in Beijing and Shanghai focused on research and development, advertising sales, and mobile platform development.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#67. In Athens I was 17 and I didn't have any expectations. I was just swimming fast and racing everybody. I didn't have the joy after my races in 2007. I didn't want to go to Beijing. I had to for sponsors.

Laure Manaudou

#68. Beijing Coma took me 10 years to finish.

Ma Jian

#69. While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.

Ma Jian

#70. Imperfect though it may be, the Beijing Platform for Action is the strongest statement of consensus on women's equality, empowerment and justice ever produced by governments.

Bella Abzug

#71. When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.

Evan Osnos

#72. I left Beijing because I wanted to be alone and to forge my own path, but I know now that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people's beginnings and ends.

Ma Jian

#73. Amazing that Americans can obtain so much mass, approximate stuff of two or three people in Beijing.

Andrew Durbin

#74. In 1908, Abdulhamid II established an Islamic university in Beijing, China, to serve China's Hui Muslims.

Firas Alkhateeb

#75. Most descriptions make Beijing sound overbuilt: not a blade of grass left.

George Vecsey

#76. Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.

Evan Osnos

#77. I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

Mira Sorvino

#78. Space is about 100 kilometers away. That's far away - I wouldn't want to climb a ladder to get there - but it isn't that far away. If you're in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

Randall Munroe

#79. It's kind of nice in some ways having an Olympic Trials where I finished second. You can kind of go in more under the radar facing a 2:03 guy and facing a lot of dudes who are faster than I am, whereas, before Beijing, I had one of the top 10 times in the field, or something like that.

Ryan Hall

#80. Linh Cinder. The renown. The reputation. The approval rating. New Beijing's best mechanic was ... a teenager? Kai was intrigued. He was amused, but more than that, he was impressed.

Marissa Meyer

#81. Often GOP political strategy seems like the human wave theory of the Chinese military translated to politics. Where Beijing uses masses of soldiers to overwhelm their adversaries, the GOP uses huge campaign budgets as a substitute for strategy, thought or issues.

Dick Morris

#82. Already 2008 has proved a tumultuous year in terms of global perceptions of China, and there are still 59 days to go until the Beijing Olympics. The tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake followed hard on the heels of the riots in Tibet and the demonstrations surrounding the Olympic torch relay.

Martin Jacques

#83. On top of my to-do list in preparing for Beijing is 'On China' by Henry Kissinger, who has had firsthand experience with every top Chinese leader since Mao, so his insights are valuable and his access is perhaps unrivaled.

Gary Locke

#84. In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.

Ma Jian

#85. If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.

Evgeny Morozov

#86. The human rights record within China seems to rise and fall over time, but it's very clear that in the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and since then, there's been a greater intolerance of dissent and the human rights record of China has been going in the wrong direction.

Gary Locke

#87. Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to this office, and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead - they call us.

Barack Obama

#88. So, I lived at the Beijing Opera, I ate there, I learned a craft. And the money we made went into the company.

John Lone

#89. Badminton in Beijing is huge - it's one of their top three sports.

Howard Bach

#90. Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

Evan Osnos

#91. Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

Evan Osnos

#92. This week, the world gathers in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic games. This is the extraordinary moment China has been dreaming of for 100 years. People have been longing for this moment, because it symbolises a turning point in China's relationship with the outside world.

Ai Weiwei

#93. I had a good chance when I went to Beijing and the guy who beat me, I'd beaten him three weeks before and he went on to win silver.

Billy Joe Saunders

#94. Report for the upcoming wedding. If we're going to be sneaking into New Beijing Palace while Levana is there, why don't we just assassinate her? Not to be all cold-wired murderer about it, but wouldn't that solve a lot of our problems?

Marissa Meyer

#95. Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

Lester R. Brown

#96. Some of the areas in China have been under very grave water scarcity: for example, the north China plain; they are facing a very serious water shortage. Per capita levels have dropped to very serious levels, including in Beijing.

Ma Jun

#97. In the final years of his life, when former Communist Party Chief Zhao Ziyang lived under house arrest, in Beijing, his aging friends resorted to donning white doctors' coats in order to slip past the guards stationed outside his home.

Evan Osnos

#98. The Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo show just how much effort China is willing to spend to enter the global stage. But while China desires to understand the world, it fails to accept its universal values.

Ai Weiwei

#99. Although the general security situation for the Beijing Olympics remains stable, we still face the challenges of terrorism, separatism and extremism.

Zhou Yongkang

#100. 1. In the end, as much as the responsibility seems to lie with Beijing, it also lies with the global consumer. Our appetite for the $30 DVD player and the $3 T-shirt helps keep jewelry factories filled with dust, illegal mines open and 16-year-olds working past midnight. We all pay the China price.

Alexandra Harney