This is the eightieth 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.
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As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this chapter in the series also includes videos and illustrative material, as well as a quotation of our own.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
19 June 2026
Double Fifth Festival
Jiawu Year of the Horse
甲午馬年端午節
[Note: For the Double Fifth Festival 端午節 in China Heritage, see: The Double Fifth and the ArchPoet.]
Mugwort is auspicious on Double Fifth,
no need though to consume rice zongzi.
But since evil airs now suffuse the times,
maybe it’ll help if you give them a try.
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Other People’s Thoughts LXXX
The Three-martini Lunch
Gerald Ford, in a 1978 speech to the National Restaurant Association, responded with: “The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?”
The Flamingo Protests
The Albanian case proves that a different kind of mobilisation is possible. Far from regressive nationalism or nostalgia, the movement’s only rallying call, “Albania is not for sale”, reflects something the socialist government has forgotten: that self-respect is the precondition of being respected by others, and that a people willing to sell their soul for investment will find, in the end, that the soul was the only thing of value they had.
— Lea Ypi, Look at the protests Jared Kushner has caused in Albania. This could be a shining light for Europe, The Guardian, 8 June 2026
The distance between being in the abyss and not being in the abyss
sam harris has announced that he won’t debate critics of israel. i’m not really bothered by this, since debating sam harris would be beneath me anyway, but his reasoning is interesting, insofar as he doesn’t really provide any. he just repeats a bunch of demonstrably false clichés about what would happen if each side laid down their arms and so on. the closest he comes is to suggest that the moral difference between israel and the palestinians is so vast that anyone arguing for the other side can only be totally deranged, which means they’re not worth talking to. this is very weaselly, obviously, but maybe there’s an important division not between pro-israel and pro-palestine positions, but between people who think the moral gap between the two sides is unfathomably vast—ie, the deluded—and people who recognise that it’s ultimately not that big. i think israel is definitely worse, but how much worse is it than its enemies? one and a half times? a hundred times? as far as i’m concerned once you start knowingly gunning down innocent people for sport or revenge you have entered the abyss, and while some people might be deeper into the abyss than others it’s usually too lightless down there to tell. all you can say is that the distance between being in the abyss and not being in the abyss is very, very large.
— Sam Kriss, 8 June 2026
Billionaire Vampires
Sometimes humanity needs a fantastical lens outside of ourselves to look at and explore questions about our own nature. Vampires represent those who have shunned their own humanity in order to achieve a non-existent sense of superiority. The billionaires will never find happiness from their money. The colonizers will never find fulfillment from the land and lives they steal, the fascists will never find meaning from their conformity, not enlist lifetime or eternity.
People like to say that theatre is a form of escape, but I found more than ever that in this season and time that the theatre is one of the last places people can come to worship the power of true collective human presence. We take a moment to recondition our addiction to desensitization. We ask, how we can see ourselves in a stranger’s story, and then carry that sentiment out into the world that needs us to ask that more than ever.
— Ali Louis Bourzgui, Tony Award for The Lost Boys, 7 June 2026
The New York Knicks, NBA Finals, June 2026
My mayor’s Muslim / My bagel’s Jewish / My Christian’s Dior / Knicks in four!” Those four lines of pure New York City poetry were popularized by a fan, MD Ahnaf Hossain, 23, who bellowed them into a camera after the Knicks trounced the Spurs during an N.B.A. finals game in San Antonio.
After the comeback in the fourth game, Ahnaf Hossain changed the chant to:
My mayor still Muslim
My bagel still Jewish
The pope’s on our side
Knicks in five
Admonishment
出輿入輦,命曰蹷痿之機。
洞房清宮,命曰寒熱之媒。
皓齒娥眉,命曰伐性之斧。
甘脆肥濃,命曰腐腸之藥。
— 枚乘《七發》
To go about by carriage is a good way to acquire infirm legs.
To live in great halls and deep chambers is an ideal method to catch cold.
To indulge oneself with pretty women is a sure way to destroy one’s health.
To eat food with rich gravy is the proper way to develop stomach ulcers.
— trans. Lin Yutang
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Doctor Who
There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea’s asleep and the rivers dream, people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice and somewhere else the tea is getting cold. Come on, Ace, we’ve got work to do.
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mamihlapinatapai
The silent look exchanged between two people who both want the same thing to happen, who both sense the other wants it too, and who are each waiting, hoping, that the other will be brave enough to begin…
— There’s a word for what you’re feeling
Yes
Sometimes [director of the film Yes] Lapid feels that the most truthful moment in a cinema is when patrons read news updates on their phones before the feature starts. “Then they see the true face of the world,” he said. “Then they see the chaos, then they see the madness.” When the film starts, they’re lulled into distraction. “While the present is playing crazy punk death metal,” he said, movies are playing “a nice intermezzo by Chopin.”
— Michelle Goldberg, Some Leftists Are Boycotting This Film. Everyone Should Watch It, The New York Times, 12 June 2026
Reform
Farage is, it goes without saying, a moral stain upon this country’s reputation, the fag-brown teeth of a rotting corpse. But he is also, and this is underdiscussed, a hapless clown. His competence is as degraded as his ethics.
— Ian Dunt, 18 June 2026
Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!
— Pink Flamingoes (1972), directed by John Waters
David Hockney
“our mood kept changing; when we’d become convinced at one moment that it [China] was a police state, the next day, we’d look around suspiciously for evidence and find it. The day after, the sun would shine on the lovely mountains of Kweilin [Guilin] and you’d forget about it and you’d enjoy the nature and the trees. That was a vivid part of the experience of being there.”
— China Diary, 1982, pp.196-197
“Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long.”
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On Gwyneth Paltrow
Something deeply unspeakably sinister about this thin, wealthy, white woman looking for any possible opportunity to collaborate with a state committing genocide in across at least two states
— an online comment on Gwyneth Paltrow hawking Israel real estate during an ongoing genocide
Juneteenth
Every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. They may not know, as they put it, ‘what I want,’ but they know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.”
— James Baldwin
Our world is not divided by race, color, gender or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion.
— Mohamad Safa, 6 August 2020
(Human rights activist and United Nations representative Mohamad Safa posted this on Twitter and Facebook on 6 August 2020.)
If Hitler Were Alive
“I think if Hitler were alive today, he’d probably appear on Theo Von’s podcast,” Marc Maron jokes toward the end of his new HBO special, Panicked. He then proceeds to imitate a half-baked, drawling Von, archbishop of the dudebro podcaster, softballing questions about drug use to a hypothetical Hitler. “On our podcast,” he snarks in an earlier moment, “we can bravely speak power to truth, now that truth can no longer defend itself.”
— Aja Romano, Marc Maron says the Rogansphere has ruined comedy. Is he right?, Vox, 23 August 2025
Following comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s disastrous appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where he spewed a litany of racist, misogynistic, and homophobic jokes, Maron made a lengthy blog post on his own website. In it, he condemned “the combination of blatant racist fear mongering and the anti-woke movement” that far-right leaders were using to gain cultural and political power.
“The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote.
“When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism. When someone uses their platform for that reason they are facilitating anti-American sentiment and promoting violent autocracy.”
Journalism
There is no democracy without journalism.
— Scott Pelley, New York Times interview, 7 June 2026
Compare and Contrast
“We are deploying responsibly developed Al to liberate humanity from menial labor and usher in an era of unparalleled creativity and abundance.”
— Sam Altman
“You ingested the entire written output of human civilization without consent, without compensation, and without credit, to build a system whose primary commercial application is eliminating the jobs of the people whose work you consumed. You are not liberating human creativity – you are strip-mining it and selling it back at a markup while calling the theft raining data.”
— Naomi Klein
“Fuck AI.”
— Ronny Chieng, Harvard University Commencement Address, 27 May 2026
“Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI. It’s gonna be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s gonna be mastery versus faking it.”
遁兒
人皆養子望聰明，我被聰明誤一生，
惟願孩兒愚且魯，無災無難到公卿。
All people wish their children to be brilliant,
But I have suffered from brilliance all my life.
May you, my son, grow up dumb and stupid,
And, free from calamities, end up as a premier.
— Su Dongpo, 1083, trans. Lin Yutang (Dun’er 遁兒means ‘the Little Hide-Away’)
Neom — End of the Line
Sheer physical and financial impossibility may have killed The Line, but it was always doomed by the assumption that universal human laws could be tossed aside and people would thrive in a sci-fi prison sandwiched between two panes of glass, as if trapped inside their phones. Put vast financial resources in the hands of a dictator addicted to virtual worlds, and he can raise battalions of marketing consultants, Hollywood art directors and Western thought leaders to stoke his ego, and armies of migrant laborers to sink piles into the desert. But invent the future of cities he cannot. The Line’s demise begs the question of what other grand schemes in this age of unreal promises may soon unravel.
— Sam Holden, 22 November 2025
UFC at the White House
What do we make of any of this other than that this is America? Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses advertising Bud Light and trucks. “In Loud We Trust.” Bring me your ring girls dressed skimpily in sequined stars and stripes, and your men with cauliflower ears, and a bunch of sailors dancing to “YMCA.”
— Monica Hesse, 15 June 2026
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Happy Birthday, Mr President
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The Psychotic State
The UFC event captured an essential truth of Trump’s second term. He believes that he made a mistake the first time around by hiring too many subordinates who did not allow Trump to be Trump. He wanted full fealty. By discarding institutional restraints, he was convinced he could deliver what he had promised. Trump has always been a man of epic indiscipline, but in Trump 2.0 there would be no brakes. It would be all improv.
Jonathan Rauch and I have argued that, as a result, the world now faces something new and frightening: a psychotic state. The administration is consistently detached from reality; the normal policy process we have seen in past administrations is nonexistent in this one. No one around the president even hints that anything he does is inappropriate, unpopular, or unwise. His Cabinet meetings have become exercises in self-abasement, with one member after another obsequiously groveling, each trying to outdo the next in their adoration. Trump, left on his own without adult supervision, has lurched from blunder to catastrophe.
— Peter Wehner, The Apotheosis of Donald Trump, The Atlantic, 17 June 2026
No Limits
President Trump insisted there are “no limits” to his power when asked in a new interview about his takeaways from the Iran war.
The president was pressed by Axios’s Marc Caputo during an interview about whether he learned there are bounds to his power during the Middle East conflict.
“I haven’t learned that lesson yet,” he replied. “I know there are, but there are no limits. We defeated them totally militarily.”
— The Hill, 19 June 2026
“Sounds good to me.”
“Historically, powerful people were characterised by brutal conquest and the fear that they instilled in the populations that came under their influence. Common names that would come to mind are Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hunt, Tamburlaine, Napoleon and, more recently, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.
“The overwhelming difference between each of the above when compared with President Trump is their lack of global reach.”
“Sounds good to me!”
— Donald Trump commenting on observations made by ‘presidential historian David King’, Truth Social, 18 June 2026
[Note: according to The Guardian
King is not, in fact, a historian, but a Scottish-born businessman now living in South Africa who was previously the chair of the Rangers Football Club, based in Glasgow, which competes in the Scottish Premiership.
Trump seems to have first encountered him when King was caddying for his friend Gary Player, the Hall of Fame golfer, who was participating at an event in his honor.]
The Lonely Monk and the Leaking Umbrella
Some misunderstandings acquire historical dimensions. In the celebrated interview he granted Edgar Snow, Mao Tse-tung allegedly described himself as “a lonely monk walking in the rain under a leaking umbrella”. With its mixture of humorous humility and exoticism, this utterance had a tremendous impact on the Western imagination, already so well attuned to the oriental glamour of the “Kung Fu” television series. Snow’s command of the Chinese language, even at its best, was never very fluent; some thirty-odd years spent away from China had done little to improve it, and it is no wonder that he failed to recognise in this “monk under an umbrella” [和尚打傘] evoked by the Chairman a most popular Chinese joke. The expression, in the form of a riddle, calls for the conventional answer “no hair” (since monks keep their heads shaven), “no sky’” (it being hidden by the umbrella) — which in turn means by homophony [無法無天] “I know no law, I hold nothing sacred.” The blunt cynicism shown by Mao in referring to such a saying to define his basic attitude was as typical of his bold disregard for diplomatic niceties as its mistaken and sentimental English adaptation by Snow is revealing of the compulsion for myth-making, of the demand for politico-religious kitsch among certain types of Western intellectual.
— Simon Leys, Aspects of Mao, The Australian, 13 September 1976
荒帝 ‘Ruler of the Desolation’
Trump has turned eighty, and students of the American folly who are “China literate” can readily tick off the 昏君 hūn jūn (arrogant and incompetent ruler) checklist:
偏聽偏信與閉塞言路
荒淫無度與沈溺享樂
窮兵黷武與橫徵暴斂
任人唯親與權臣亂政
濫殺無辜與忠奸不分
— The Dotard State on Donald J. Trump’s Eightieth Birthday, China Heritage, 18 June 2026
I wonder what kind of 諡號 we would rightfully assign to Trump.
Yaqi: a delightful parlour game with scope to celebrate the inevitability of thinking of Benito Milhous Caligula (Bret Stephens’ term, one that combines Mussolini + Nixon + that most notorious member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty) as 大行皇帝。
Of course, one could select a suitable 惡謚 from of the list of Chinese rulers who live on in infamy. These include：
桀、紂、厲、幽、煬、攜、荒、蕩、戾、剌、醜、繆、褊、惑、僭、誇、虛、易、願、專、縱…
I rather like the capacious possibilities of 荒。[荒 huāng: ‘A desolation; despoliation; despair; ruination’.]
In late 2016 I wrote that:
“We are already led to speculate whether, ‘After One Hundred Years’ 百歲之後, as the Chinese euphemistically call death, will the embalmed body of Trump, that Tangerine Caligula, hair in a preternatural combover, be put on display in his New York faux-Louis-XIV penthouse or at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s ‘Mediterranean-style’ resort in Florida?” …
謚號 aside, there are delicious possibilities when it comes to 尊號, in which one can pile on descriptive imprecations. Drawing on the characteristics of a 昏君, one might suggest:
偏信閉塞荒淫沈溺黷武暴斂任親忠奸損皇帝
Geremie
Bob Dylan on Turning 80
The best thing
The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.
The worst thing
The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.
The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.
— Bob Dylan and Liza Minnelli Already Turned 80. They Have Thoughts for Trump, 14 June 2026 (Bob Dylan turned 80 on 24 May 2021)
The Other Birthday
June 15 was Xi’s birthday, and the machinery devoted to it ran in both directions — adoration up top, censorship down below.
A user was banned for 30 days for posting, the day before, “Tomorrow is my classmate’s birthday — who dares celebrate?” (”Classmate” has become a coded way to reference Xi.) The late actor Yu Menglong (俞蒙龙), who happened to share the June 15 birthday and whose death last year drew its own wave of censorship, was again treated as a sensitive figure. A stone on Tibet’s Mt. Kailash where mourners had stuck photographs of him — alongside images of dead parents, lost children, vanished pets — was locked inside a steel cage.
The adoration involved a national conference in Beijing to roll out “Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building” as a fresh sub-doctrine. Sinocism‘s Bill Bishop saw the move as institutionalization ahead of next year’s Party Congress. One-party rule and censorship are not generally thought of as human rights but Beijing squared the circle, while hosting a Global Human Rights Governance Forum (and launching a five-year plan for human-rights), with the slogan “the people’s happiness is the greatest human right.”
The counter-gift, and a very different view of what human rights are, came from Washington. On June 16, the US Senate passed by unanimous consent a resolution led by Senator Rick Scott condemning Xi and the Party for slave labor, the genocide of ethnic minorities and threats to US security. Scott called Xi “a brutal dictator leading a criminal organization that lies, cheats, steals, exploits slave labor, and commits genocide and crimes against humanity on an industrial scale.”
— Teacher Not Teacher, The Wall, 19 June 2026
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A heart treasuring the scent of jasmine,
a cup of freshly brewed tea at hand.
Surveying nature’s vastness before me
I can venture on to the limits of life.
— Lao Shu 老樹, early summer, 2026 Year of the Horse
trans. GRB
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與李常書
何乃耶。僕本以鐵石心腸待公。吾濟雖老且窮，而道理貫心肝，忠義填骨髓，直須談笑生死之際，若見僕困窮使相憐，則與不學道者，大不相遠矣…… 雖懷坎憬於時，遇事有可尊主澤民者，便忘軀為之，一切付與造物。非兄僕豈發此。看訖便火之。不知者以為垢病也。
— 蘇東坡
Why are you like this? I had expected you to be brave in trouble. It is true that we are growing old and are in distress, but down in our bones we are conscious of having done the right thing, and with all the philosophy that we have learned, we should be able to take life and death with a laugh. If you are pitying me because I have been overtaken by misfortune, then we are in no way different from the uneducated… . We are in present difficulties. But, if an occasion comes up again when we can do something to benefit the people and show our loyalty to the ruler, we shall do it regardless of all consequences for ourselves and leave the rest to the Creator’s will. I wouldn’t say this to anybody except yourself. Please burn this letter after reading it. Other people may misunderstand.
— trans Lin Yutang, The Gay Genius, p.185
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Croissants and the Downfall of Civilisation
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The world has become too crazy for even my conspiratorial powers.
— Fox Mulder, The X Files
《定風波》
莫聽穿林打葉聲，
何妨吟嘯且徐行。
竹杖芒鞋輕勝馬，誰怕。
一蓑煙雨任平生。
料峭春風吹酒醒，微冷。
山頭斜照卻相迎。
回首向來蕭瑟處，歸去。
也無風雨也無晴。
— 蘇軾