This is the eighty-fourth 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 short videos and illustrative material.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
17 August 2026
離家四十又四年，俗身混跡紅塵中。
亂七八糟天天忙，終於熬成一老翁。
榮辱得失都見過，名利想透皆是空。
如今唯一還惦記，新攤煎餅卷大蔥。
Left home some forty-four years ago,
I’m long mired in the common world.
Busy, day in day out, with this and that,
made it through, now just an old bloke.
Seen it all, the lure of fame and fortune,
seen through it too; I know it’s pointless.
So, these days, all I really hanker after is
some shallots wrapped in a fresh jianbing.
— Lao Shu 老樹，煎餅卷大蔥，《早安》系列，2026年8月6，trans. GRB
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Other People’s Thoughts, LXXXIV
I feel entirely dehumanised by the sun now and wish for fog, snow, rain, humanity.
— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Edward Sackville-West, September 1926
Those who think about national security love to bandy acronyms such as ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) and WOMBAT (Weapon of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank). They need to add AMOC to the list. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is not a weapons system. But it could lay waste a continent—specifically, Europe—to an extent that only a nuclear war could outmatch.
— The shutdown of ocean currents could freeze Europe, The Economist, 14 August 2025
23 July 2026
I have decided to start living my second-best life. It is easier, and almost as good.
— SLA (Daniel Piper), Serious Literary Diary: July 2026
Manifesting Zuckerberg
… there was a time when Zuckerberg was writing these happy manifestos about social media. And he was saying that the way that we’re going to have a happy world is we’re going to make it more open and connected. We’re going to get every single human being on Facebook and Instagram and get them all talking. And we’re going to have more democracy than you’ve ever seen before. Suffice to say that didn’t really work out. Now we get to bring the exact same maximalist universalist framing, which of course also maps 100% to Meta’s business interests, but this time in the context of AI.
— Hard Fork, Zuckerberg’s Anti-Doom Fantasy, 14 Aug 2026
The ridiculousness of AI
- AI copies every human on the planet.
- AI creates facsimile of work from human results.
- AI Programmer programs AI to recognize AI by looking at all the examples AI has produced (by copying humans).
- Now AI has sure-fire 100% accurate detection of AI by seeing all the AI copying humans. Proclaims can detect non-humans better than humans.
- AI declares ALL HUMANS ARE FAKE, and Grok is the only real person. 100% GUARANTEED.
— Ken Rose, 8 August 2026
Swearing by AI
I learned a long time ago from my customer service clients, that if you really want to speak to a person, you have to swear. The chat bots can’t handle that so they put through to a real person. Eventually…if they have any.
Aid and Abet
remember
whenever you feel worthless
right now
one of your calls
might be being used
for training purposes
— SLA (Serious Literary Author, Daniel Piper)
Can we just recognize how fucking cookoo bananas this is? Do you know why AI can write a book that is almost indistinguishable from the work of popular writers? Because it STOLE OUR WORK. Companies illegally took our work to build their shitty product and as they seek to cash out on this bubble and leave us holding the financial bag for their corrupt practices, now I’m supposed to fucking document every word that I type to prove that I didn’t use the machine that wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t stolen from me in the first place?
Absolutely not. I refuse.
— Ijeoma Oluo, It’s Fucked That I Have to Think of AI, The Good Journey, 14 August 2026
Christopher Nolan
… he is an analogue director in a digital age. He represents our anxieties and concerns. Our self-hate when we close the social media app on our phone and briefly see our image reflected back at us in the darkness of its screen, feeling emptied-out and wasted.
Nolan represents nostalgia for a previous world. One of tactility, physicality, time, craft and shared experience. Before AI, before the internet, before digital.
— Ian Dunt, Nostalgia is a Terrible Drug, Striking 13, 7 August 2026
The Separation of Powers
I guess it’s hard to separate church from state when you can’t even separate fact from fiction.
— online comment
The Dissident Hoàng Thị Hồng Thái
Early in the day of her arrest, she seemed to know something was coming. At 6:10 a.m. in Hanoi, her last Facebook post read:
Lying is easy.
Silence is safe.
Living true to yourself carries a price.
I’m not sad because life is hard.
I’m sad because I chose not to betray myself,
and the price for that choice… is too high.
— Hoàng Thái Hoàng
And her arrest hardly happened in a vacuum. It slotted neatly into a pattern Vietnam has been tightening for years. Over the past decade, nearly 500 people have been detained for speech, journalism, or online expression, and state outlets have been signalling a harder line again as the 14th Communist Party Congress approaches in another couple weeks. The rhythm is familiar: a few arrests, a few warnings, a reminder of where the boundaries sit. Sometimes exile.
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Yaita Akio on the Silencing of Hong Kong
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Great Leap Speed
The reflecting pool was rushed, and the coating peeled. The East Wing was rushed into rubble. The plane was rushed, and had to be grounded for security upgrades. The tariffs were rushed, and then repeatedly rewritten, billions in refunds issued. USAID was dismantled before anyone had worked out who would administer its programs. Men were rushed onto deportation flights. Then the country was rushed into war.
I’ve Seen the Future
Spend enough time in Beijing and Washington these days and the rivalry looks less like a clash of competing systems than like a race between small oligarchic groups—tight circles of men with immense power over everyone else’s future. In China, Xi is trying to bend technology toward obedience and growth. In America, Trump and his allies in Silicon Valley have put the development of A.I. ahead of concerns about its risks.
— Evan Osnos, The Future, Made in China, The New Yorker, 3 August 2026
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缺德時代
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At the Least
“If you cannot gift trans people with visibility, humanity and acceptance, could you at least gift them with silence?” Van Lathan, co-host of Higher Learning podcast, said of the controversy. “Could you at least shut the f**k up about it?”
— Transgender Player Controversy Helps Drive Rise In WNBA Viewership, Forbes, 13 August 2026
A little saucepan is boiling on the fire.
I see that the BBC has been told there will be no increase in its license fee plus it must look after the World Service and S4C. Good. It should increase the funding to the World Service, which is one of the few things foreigners like about Britain and which pitches its journalism on a comparatively high intellectual level.
What to do about S4C, meanwhile, is simple: close it down. Virtually nobody watches it – well, actually, LITERALLY nobody watches it. A recent survey showed that almost 200 of its programmes had zero viewers. What an epic waste of money just to assuage the sensibilities of some of those miserable, seaweed munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill tribes who are perpetually bitter about having England as a next door neighbour. S4C has become a state funded sinecure for the utterly talentless, the dregs who cannot even get a job at HTV (Cymru); a corrupt political sop of not the scantest interest to even Welsh people. Bin it, Johnny Bach. Bin it.
— Ron Liddle, Sosban fach yn berwi ana tan, The Spectator, 20 October 2010
Ron Liddle
He was not some genius satirist but a bloviating bully with a taste for bigotry who could always fall back on the excuse that he was ‘only joking’. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, he said exactly that:
‘I’m just joking, don’t you understand?’ I try to get away with things too often by saying that. It’s a flaw.”
— Mic Wright, Liddle to be Celebrated, Conquest of the Useless, 4 August 2026
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Hole in the Ass of the United States
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Country Music
I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.
— Bob Newhart, d. 18 July 2024
國民性新版本
吃地沟油的命，操中南海的心。
— 網絡流行語
Tree in the Forest
if a person
takes a break
from social media
without announcing it
on social media
did it even
happen
— SLA (Daniel Piper)
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Papi醬生氣了/ I’m So Mad
“完全沒發現你竟然是這樣的人”
“OMG你嚇到我了”
“你的品位配不上我”
“拜拜再見，聊不下去了”
“黃瓜味最難吃了”
—Papi醬，《生氣了》，歌詞
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A Carbuncle
A man goes to the doctor and takes off his hat to reveal a huge toad on the top of his head. “When did you notice that?” asked the doctor. And the toad answers: “It began as a boil on my ass.”
— Stockard Channing: ‘I cried at the election of Joe Biden, thinking we were out of the woods. Wrong!’, The Guardian, 8 August 2026
Wilde’s Tomb
… a stone filing cabinet. The sphinx seems to be crammed into it — like an S&M trick — ready to slide out of its drawer and fly off. It towers over the rooftops of the more conventional resting places of the voisinage, minarets and sentry boxes, a collapsed villa on one side with rusty grilles, a romantic lady on the other draped over her marble husband’s slab. Others watch with dead bronze eyes from their plinths as everyone hurries by towards the star attraction. …
Oscar’s tomb is the most popular destination in Père Lachaise, above Jim Morrison, Marcel Proust, Chopin, Piaf and Colette and its base is covered with the lipstick prints of a million kisses. It is a beacon for lost dreamers, a straw to clutch at for outcasts and the clinically depressed, and there is a strange energy around it.
— Rupert Everett, To the End of the World — Travels with Oscar Wilde, 2020, p.139
Jason Arday
I didn’t have much to say about Jason Arday when he was alive and I have even less to say about him personally now that he’s passed away. But I think his death reflects a level of invasiveness and vitriol that’s become far too normal in public life. It perhaps frightens me more than the ambivalence that drives otherwise “good” people to look away from the pressing issues of our time. Because we are looking. Constantly. Watching others, devising our opinions, pining for viral moments, hoping a post will change our own lives. Before I write about anyone publicly, I am governed by one question only: if they were across the room for me, would I be okay reading out what I’m writing? AKA: Would I stand on fucking business? I tend not to write about any one person until I’m certain the answer is yes. But the etiquette of this weirdo, parasocial infotainment media sphere doesn’t require such consideration, let alone value it, instead it encourages not seeing the subjects of our words as real people, to not see the topics we debate as affecting real lives. It is all sport. Self-serving fuel for posts and think-pieces. The British media hounded a professor for unsubstantiated claims of plagiarism more than it has hounded any of the men substantially named in the Epstein files. An entire institutional machine ramped up its shaming rituals to full tilt over an black man who was flawed but seemed mostly harmless. The same machine never congregates with such scathing bloodlust for people who are obviously terrible, it continuously to use its kiddy-glove passive voice when it comes to the commitment of a genocide or the lying, far-right, bigoted party leader who has solicited funds from foreign crypto-billionaires and is trying to usher in a new age of fascism after fucking us all over with Brexit. And none of these so-called journalists and right-wing grifters who’ve been foaming at the mouth, fake moralising, will look at this moment and show an ounce of self-reflection, humility, remorse or responsibility for how their words have gone too far. Instead, we will endure their slimy rationalisations, their weaseling as they offer empty and begrudging condolences, silently removing or modifying all their institutionally-backed online tongue-lashings so they can pretend the gratuitous bile they spewed made no contribution to Arday’s death. That, to me, is a perfect representation of how fucking insidiously exhausting racism is, of how cowardly white supremacy fucking is as a collective blight on this whole fucking planet. An insatiable lust for blood spread thin on so many hands that no one person can be convicted of holding the blade. But the outcome always, conveniently, materialises in black death regardless. More people are going to die this way, I fear. Discoursed to fucking death.
— Inigo Laguda, 15 August 2026
Black people make up around 1% of the professorships in the United Kingdom. Trans people are less than 1% of the population. British media knows how to go after 1 percenters—unless its the ones at the top.
Lynching Pictures
The lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness. About inhumanity. They force us to think about the extent of the evil unleashed specifically by racism. Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it. The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree. The display of these pictures makes us spectators, too.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003
Presidential Doublethink
“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
— Ronald Reagan, 4 March 1987
普天同慶
There’s something deeply bizarre about the possibility that humanity’s first truly simultaneous global celebration, across every time zone, might be triggered by the death of a single human being.
— Roman Hardt
Paranoia Cut Up
“A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on.” — William S. Burroughs
There are countless variants of this quote found online, almost always given with no attribution. The quote above comes from a 1970 interview called “Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police,” collected in the volume Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews 1960-1997.
Interestingly, later in that same book he is quoted as saying:
“I never made that remark about paranoia, though I guess somebody must have made it.”
This comes from a 1982 interview with Alan Bold.
It is not clear why Burroughs denied his original statement. It is possible that the first quote was repeated so many times, and so inaccurately, that he simply forgot and felt it was someone else’s line, incorrectly attributed to him. His words had, somewhat ironically, been cut up by others, meaning they were no longer his own.
— David S. Willis, 11 August 2026
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知了
一蟬高柳嘶鳴，有人寫入《詩經》。
從此無人再見，誰知其中隱情？
今日有人重讀，千年一夢方醒。
慢慢爬出詩行，窗外吹過微風。
— 老樹，宜聽蟬鳴，《老樹日曆》，2026年8月11日
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Falsification
‘I once said that when you do economic work in China, you should not put too much trust in figures.’
— Zhu Rongji, ‘Put “Accuracy” Foremost in Statistical Work’, 28 October 2002
The Dream of the Beat Generation
The Beat Generation is no hoodlumism. As the man who suddenly thought of that word ‘beat’ to describe our generation, I would like to have my little say about it before everyone else in the writing field begins to call it ‘roughneck,’ ‘violent,’ ‘heedless,’ ‘rootless.’ How can people be rootless? Heedless of what? Wants? Roughneck because you don’t come on elegant?
Beat doesn’t mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity.
Being bugged is not being beat. You may be withdrawn, but you don’t have to be mean about it. Beatness is not a form of tired old criticism. It is a form of spontaneous affirmation. What kinda culture you gonna have with everybody’s gray faces saying ‘I don’t think that’s quite correct’?
I only hope there won’t be a war to hurt all these beautiful people, and I don’t think there will be. There appears to be a Beat Generation all over the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. I think Russia wants a share of what America has—food and clothing and pleasantries for most everyone.
I prophesy that the Beat Generation which is supposed to be nutty nihilism in the guise of new hipness, is going to be the most sensitive generation in the history of America and therefore it can’t help but do good. Whatever wrong comes will come out of evil interference. If there is any quality that I have noticed more strongly than anything else in this generation, it is the spirit of non-interference with the lives of others. I had a dream that I didn’t want the lion to eat the lamb and the lion came up and lapped my face like a big puppy dog and then I picked up the lamb and it kissed me. This is the dream of the Beat Generation.
— Jack Kerouac, ‘Lamb, No Lion’, Pageant Magazine, February 1958
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The Streep Effect
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Concerning the Jews
He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greekand the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?
— Mark Twain, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1899
1858
Sept. 19: Decided that one must love and work, and that’s it.
Sept. 20: Tired. Didn’t love and didn’t work.
— Leo Tolstoy
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Literary types indulge in otherworldly fantasies,
but where can one find an unspoiled spot now?
Instead, they have to make do with ‘rus in urbe’,
which is really just plants in pots on a balcony.
— Lao Shu 老樹，宜種菜養花草，《老樹日曆》，2026年8月12日, trans. GRB