if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

In Shanghai, I saw great contrasts. On one street there would be impressive shops selling copies of the latest word in glamorous European fashion, and around the corner on a back street there were poor families crammed into one room with a naked light bulb. One evening I heard a Chinese family singing "Happy Birthday." It was weird. You would have thought that they'd have their own happy birthday song. Every dominant society in the world - whether it's French or British or American - imposes its culture on less developed societies.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.