Tiananmen Quotes

#1. In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.

Ma Jian

#2. He took over, and he said: 'If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.'" - Recalling how former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping dealt with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests

Lee Kuan Yew

#3. The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren't allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminating information about it.

Ma Jian

#4. If you go to Tiananmen Square, or go to any public area in China, you will hear my music at some point.

Kenny G

#5. The Chinese leadership hoped that the world would soon forget the Tiananmen Square massacre. Our job in Congress is to ensure that we never forget those who lost their lives in Tiananmen Square that day or the pro-democracy cause for which they fought.

Tom Lantos

#6. Soccer's not a game that you can restrict players, especially creative players and players who have proven themselves at that level.

Tiffeny Milbrett

#7. In spring 1989 ... I saw the buildup of demonstrations from Chengdu to Tiananmen Square. It struck me that fear had been forgotten to such an extent that few of the millions of demonstrators perceived danger. Most seemed to be taken by surprise when the army opened fire.

Jung Chang

#8. Throughout these pages, my brush weeps in sorrow for what happened in Tiananmen Square.

Not for the first time, a government was turning the guns on its people. Has the world learned nothing from history?

Morgan Chua

#9. I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.

Samuel R. Delany

#10. [They let] friendship with the leaders in China obscure our devotion to freedom and democracy when those kids set up in Tiananmen Square, and I think it was wrong.

William J. Clinton

#11. A critic once described me as an 'amiable beanpole.' I got it printed on a T-shirt.

John Gordon Sinclair

#12. To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen may have given an impression of a solid and energetic consensus against dictatorship and for democracy, but they were an egotistical and fractious lot, riven by disagreements over tactics and money.

Pankaj Mishra

#13. The less one knows, the more he thinks he knows, and the more willing he is to employ any and all measures to enforce his views upon others.

Paul Harris

#14. The great seats of power tend to be wide and open, not vertical and soaring. Red Square, Tiananmen Square, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin - all massive but with large open spaces that project an image of might.

Gary Ross

#15. There are other issues I have felt more emotionally connected to, like China, where I lived and worked for some time. I was living there when Tiananmen Square erupted.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#16. I once had been in the middle of a mass chaos and terrible riots.
There, I witnessed how men were truly such as beasts unleashed.

Toba Beta

#17. Somehow I feel a little bit odd in Tiananmen Square because I was a soldier, in a uniform, watching those leaders and tanks, and I was part of them.

Bai Ling

#18. The integrity of China was more important than [the people] in Tiananmen Square.

Muammar Al-Gaddafi

#19. 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

#20. Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it.

Karl Barth

#21. I'm a con artist in that I'm an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn't.

John Lithgow

#22. Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests.

Pankaj Mishra

#23. North Korean students and intellectuals didn't dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root.

Barbara Demick