This is the sixty-third chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
The purview of Other People’s Thoughts has expanded to include video material. In this chapter in the series, we feature Lesley Nielsen and Andy Lau.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
12 August 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LXII:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXIII
Renaissance Men
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
— Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles in The Third Man
Come Unto Me
In 2016, Francis published Dear Pope Francis, a book of letters from children around the world. One came from William, age 7: “If you could do one miracle, what would it be?” Francis answered: “I would heal children. I have never been able to understand why children suffer. It’s a mystery. I pray about this a lot. The only answer I can offer is silence — or tears.”
— Christopher Hale, 1 August 2025
Animal Farm
Molly Ivins’s quote about Dan Quayle applies equally well to Trump: “If you put that man’s brain in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards.”
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Let’s be honest: the Trump/MAGA coalition was never a symphony. It was a chaotic garage band of misfits, goon-cave alt-Reich incel lost boys, QAnon doofuses in their mildewy trailers, white grievance dads on who want a penis-pump tax deduction, Prosperity Gospel hucksters, Steve Bannon’s body lice, MAGA scamfluencers, dead-eyed crypto bros, burn-it-down accelerationists, and the kinds of people who’d lose money in a three-card monte game twice.
— Rick Wilson, 29 July 2025
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Comrade Khrushchev goes to visit a pig farm, along with a photographer from Pravda. Later, in the newsroom, the layout team is trying to decide how to word the caption. Should it be ‘Comrade Khrushchev next to pigs,’ or ‘Comrade Khrushchev surrounded by pigs, or maybe ‘Pigs gather around Comrade Khrushchev’? The suggestions are rejected one after another. Finally, the editor steps in. ‘OK, here it is,’ he says. ‘Comrade Khrushchev, third from right.’
Sic Transit
Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.
— Rashid Khalidi, I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump, The Guardian, 1 August 2025
I Shot Twice Once
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障子あけて置く 海も暮れきる
— 尾崎放哉
Continuity
The Soviet elite, in fact, had a great deal in common with the tsarist nobility. They were a little less elegant, maybe, and a little more educated, but with the same aristocratic contempt for money, the same sidereal distance from the people, the same propensity for arrogance and violence. You can’t escape your fate, and Russia’s fate is to be governed by the descendants of Ivan the Terrible. Invent whatever you like-the proletarian revolution, unbridled liberalism—but the result is always the same. At the top are the oprichniki, the tsar’s guard dogs. At least today there is a modicum of order, a semblance of respect. That’s already some-thing. And we’ll see how long it lasts.
— Giuliano Da Emploi, The Wizard of the Kremlin (2022), 2025, p.43
邪修
最近，網絡上掀起了一股「萬物皆可邪修」的風潮。
「邪修」常見於武俠、仙俠小說中，指代「用歪門邪道的方式修煉」，「邪修」者通常走捷徑，因此修煉進展較常者要快上許多。但這個梗被網友們重新定義為「 用非常規、離譜但高效的方式解決問題」，大家發現，一旦開始「邪修」，根本停不下來！
有意思的是，一些看起來十分離譜的「邪修」方法，實際上卻是讓有用的知識以一種詭異的方式進入了大腦。
— 最近「邪修」太火了！乍看離譜，但實際上卻超有用，《光明網》，2025年8月5日
Tantalus
If punishment can strike unexpectedly and for no apparent reason, one’s subjects will be kept in a state of constant alert. A person who knows he has only to follow certain rules to stay safe ends up developing a sense of security that can pose a danger and push him toward rebellion. Whereas a subject kept in a perpetual state of uncertainty is prone to panic at any moment, and the idea of rebellion never enters his head. He’s too busy fending off the lightning bolts that might strike at any moment, without warning.
— Giuliano Da Emploi, The Wizard of the Kremlin, p.54
Primitive Communism
In Nepal in 1971, you could live comfortably on less than a dollar a day. Lodging was cheap. Dirt cheap if you were willing to share a room.
That night I shared one with an American in his late twenties. He had ginger hair, a red goatee and lips so narrow they hardly registered. His bed was two feet from mine and beside it he had a stack of books—all political—none of which I’d heard of. He introduced himself and asked if I knew who Mikhail Bakunin was. To hide my ignorance, I jokingly asked if he was the same Bakunin who played right wing for Dynamo Kyiv. My roommate forced a thinnish smile, more in an attempt to overlook my unfamiliarity with Bakunin than in reaction to my joke. Appreciating this encouraged me to listen more intently when, minutes later, he launched into a spiel about communism, quoting Marx and Trotsky, and about how society needed to become a better place-one where the world’s wealth would be shared equally by everyone. This made a lot of sense to me and I went to sleep regretting how little I knew about politics.
I didn’t know how cold the nights could be in Nepal, and I woke up a few hours later shivering and in need of some more blankets. Seeing as my communist roommate had a huge pile on top of his sleeping body, I gently nudged him and asked if I could borrow one. He woke, stared at me for a few seconds and then screamed, “Fuck off!”
— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything, p.63
The wise traveler travels only in imagination
I grew up believing that travel broadens the mind; nowadays I’m not too sure. Perhaps it depends on the mind. There’s a character in a short story by Somerset Maugham who says: “The wise traveler travels only in imagination.” Reading this post-stroke, when my traveling days were numbered, cheered me up because it fit neatly into my narrative. But after reading that Maugham was the most widely traveled writer of his generation, it no longer fit so well. Socrates—the philosopher, not the Brazilian footballer-never once traveled outside Athens. He argued that it was possible to learn more about the world by reading than by traveling. Being exiled in my own body these days, I’m eager to believe this, but I’m not convinced I do.
— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything, p.71
Christopher Hitchens
As a younger man, Hitchens was bisexual and almost expelled from school for sleeping with another boy. He explained that he became a dedicated heterosexual when his looks deteriorated to the point where no man would have him. Throughout the thirty-two years I knew him, Hitchens had a constant twinkle in his eye, as though about to unleash some devastating witticism.
In 1981, a year after Lynn and I had opened the Odeon, we bumped into Hitchens and his first wife, Eleni Meleagrou, at the Algonquin Hotel hours after they’d married. “It’s good to be sleeping with a married woman again,” he said with a smile.
Hitchens was an unrelenting supporter of the Palestinian cause and wrote scathingly on powerful public figures, including Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and the “sainted” Mother Teresa. In addition to writing a book a year and countless articles, Hitchens regularly appeared on the lecture circuit, engaging opponents in torrid debate. He had such skills that watching him, the writer Martin Amis declared, “In debate, I would back him, whatever the motion, against Cicero.” The journalist Lynn Barber rated Hitchens “one of the greatest conversationalists of our age.”
Another was Jonathan Miller.
Although Jewish by birth, both Hitchens and Miller were self-proclaimed atheists, Miller would say he didn’t think of himself as Jewish, “except for the purpose of admitting it to antisemites.” Hitchens claimed: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence,” If I believed in God, I would have converted to atheIsm the moment I heard this.
— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything, pp.178-179
Robert Hughes
I didn’t know Hughes, but seeing him alone at Balthazar one morning, I nervously asked if he’d consider writing the introduction to the restaurant’s cookbook. It’d pay $40,000. “Sorry, mate, but I’ve more serious things to write about,” he said. I then offered him free food at Balthazar for the rest of his life. “Come to think of it … I’ve always wanted to write an introduction to a cookbook.”
— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything, p.176
Unquiet Grave
We were creating a vulgar, barbaric TV, as the nature of the medium required. The Americans had nothing new to teach us, in fact we were the ones pushing the envelope when it came to trash broadcasts. Still, from time to time, the immortal Russian soul would rise from the depths. We had the idea at one point for a big patriotic show, and we asked our audience to tell us their heroes, the people who make Mother Russia truly proud. We were expecting the great minds: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Andrei Rublev, or possibly an actor or a pop star, as would happen in your country. But what did our viewers tell us, who did the formless mass of the people, accustomed to bowing their heads and looking at the ground, propose? Dictators! Their heroes, the country’s founding figures, were all bloodstained autocrats: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin. We had to falsify the results to put Alexander Nevsky in first place—at least he was a warrior, not an exterminator. But the person with the most votes was Stalin. Stalin! Do you realize? It was at that point I understood that Russia would never be a country like the rest. Not that anyone ever thought otherwise.
— Giuliano Da Emploi, The Wizard of the Kremlin, p.70
Gaza
Hitler won. He changed us.
— Miriam Margoles
My Individualism
The nation may well be important, but we cannot possibly concern ourselves with the nation from morning to night as though possessed by it. There may be those who insist that we think of nothing but the nation twenty-four hours a day, but in fact no one can go on thinking about one single thing as incessantly as that. The bean-curd seller does not go around selling bean curd for the nation’s sake. He does it to earn a living. Whatever his immediate motives may be, he does contribute something necessary to society and in that sense, perhaps, the nation benefits indirectly. The same might be said of the fact that I had three bowls of rice today for lunch and four for supper. I took a larger serving not for the nation’s sake but, frankly, to suit my stomach. These things might be said to have some very indirect influence on the country, and indeed, from certain points of view, they might bear some relation to the entire drift of world affairs. But what a horror if we had to take that into account and eat for the nation, wash our faces for the nation, go to the toilet for the nation!
— Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石, ‘私の個人主義’, 1914
Enshittification
In such a fragmented era, grand narratives feel obscene. The elderly join the Party, the middle-aged recite sutras, the young lie flat, the “little pinks” hunt “sluts” and “traitors,” tycoons keep mistresses, children fight over inheritances. The poor, meanwhile, cheer infrastructure.
— Li Chengpeng, Turd Blossoms on West Lake, China Heritage, 6 August 2025
J.K. Rowling’s Transition
“Who is this? Who is this Jake? Who is he? JK Rowling.” Ziwe said Rowling “is a she.”
“That is not a feminine name in the slightest,” they said about Rowling. “I know that oftentimes, female authors use initials so that people assume it’s a male writer. I have to presume that J.K. Rowling was unsatisfied with the way that the world saw her, and then she transitioned herself into a new personality so that the world would perceive her the way she wanted to be perceived.”
After a moment of silence, Ziwe responded to the remark with: “Gagging,” prompting Monsoon to burst out laughing.
Kitchen Renovation
— What do you want?
— Do you know that picture of the Hoover Dam?
— Do you want modern?
— Yes, but not what modern was, postmodern, or what it is, just new, but what it will be.
— You know, like a stainless steel operating theatre.
— No, no. When you’re at the dentist and there’s that chair and “clang-clang-clang”, the big light comes down, and there’s this pink spit thing, you spit into that bowl, that sort of look is what I want. The bowl.
— A sort of ultra-modern spitoon.
— Yes!
— I thought you liked some of the ones in the Conran book.
— That’s depressing in itself, darling. No matter what you’re doing, whatever you want, there’s always a Terence-bloody-buggery-Conran book on it! Piece of muslin and a terracotta tile and suddenly it’s Tuscany. It takes more than a carefully placed bottle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar to make a kitchen.
— Patsy and Edina discuss a new kitchen in Absolutely Fabulous
Through a glass, darkly
ChatGPT is a text generation engine that speaks in the smeared-out voice of the internet as a whole. All it knows how to do is emulate that voice, and all it cares about is getting the voice right. In that sense, it’s not making a mistake when it hallucinates, because all ChatGPT can do is hallucinate. It’s a machine that only does one thing. There is no notion of truth or falsehood at work in its calculations of what to say next. All that’s there is a blurred image of online language usage patterns. It is the internet seen through a glass, darkly.
— Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, 2025
To borrow some technical terminology from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, “ChatGPT is bullshit.” Paraphrasing Frankfurt, a liar cares about the truth and wants you to believe something different, whereas the bullshitter is utterly indifferent to the truth. Donald Trump is a bullshitter, as is Elon Musk when he makes grandiose claims about the future capabilities of his products. And so is Sam Altman and the LLMs that power OpenAI’s chatbots. Again, all ChatGPT ever does is hallucinate — it’s just that sometimes these hallucinations happen to be accurate, though often they aren’t. (Hence, you should never, ever trust anything that ChatGPT tells you!)
They’re dopamine dealers offering the ultimate product: artificial relationships that provide just enough stimulation to keep you engaged while requiring none of the effort, compromise, or growth that real relationships demand. They’re designed to be more perfect than any human could be—more patient, more understanding, more available, more focused on your needs.
But here’s the catch: they’re also designed to be more addictive than any drug, more isolating than any substance, and more destructive to human social fabric than any technology we’ve yet unleashed.
The most insidious aspect of this entire enterprise is how it markets itself as a solution to problems it helped create.
Grok
AI seems to know everything—until it’s a topic where you have firsthand knowledge.
— Jonathan Shedler, X, 9 August 2025
將錯就錯
講，你又唔聽；聽，你又唔明；明，你又唔做；做，你又做錯；錯，你又唔認；認，你又唔改；改，你又唔服；咁你要點呀？
ー劉德華，《江湖》
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Reading
I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
— C.S. Lewis
When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.
— Clifton Fadiman
Once Leonard Cohen read a whole poem on the radio. The interviewer asked him “What does the poem mean?” Cohen paused for a long moment — and then read the entire poem again.
Vale Fu Guoyong 傅國湧
Calling across the Pacific, we found ourselves dwelling, once more, on the proximity of death. “Once,” my friend sighed, “we saw off our elders. In recent years, we have begun seeing off our peers. Now we are seeing off those younger than we are—the generation of the 1989 students.” Fu belonged to that generation. These past six months and more, friends seem to have lined up to depart in haste, and one cannot help pondering again and again the meaning of life. China needs scholars like Fu Guoyong: self-assured and modest, diligent and mild. His thought and his character will stand as a standard for independent scholars of this era, and he will be missed always.
隔著太平洋喊話，彼此慨嘆的話題之一是死亡的逼近。友人嘆氣說，“過去為咱們的前輩送行，近年以來開始為咱們的同輩送行，現在，居然開始為比我們年輕的八九學生一代送行了！”傅國湧是八九學生一代。多半年以來，朋友們似乎排著隊匆匆離去，不能不讓人一再思索生命的意義。中國需要傅國湧這樣的學者，他自信又謙遜，精進又溫和。他的思想和人格將成為這個時代民間學者的一個標桿，讓人永遠懷念。
— Bei Ming, 4 August 2025,《北明的石經》
Taking a Bow
Not many people admit it: actors, musicians, writers, they all talk about how they want to change the world, or that they are a storyteller. But, essentially, we just like being clapped.
— Tim Minchin looks back, The Guardian, 10 August, 2025
Interpretations
A poet sits in a coffee shop, writing.
The old lady
thinks he is writing a letter to his mother,
the young woman
thinks he is writing a letter to his girlfriend,
the child
thinks he is drawing,
the businessman
thinks he is considering a deal,
the tourist
thinks he is writing a postcard,
the employee
thinks he is calculating his debts.
The secret policeman
walks, slowly, towards him.
— Mourid Barghouti, trans. Radwa Ashour
To get born, your body makes a pact with death,
and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat —
— Louise Glück, A Slip of Paper
Posthumous
I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.
— Tom Lehrer, d. 26 July 2025
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
— Jorge Luis Borges