Opium War Quotes & Sayings

I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we - and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians - have imagined. — Paul A. Cohen

One time, Niall sat on the floor for hours trying to find a way of putting his M&M's in alphabetical order. — Louis Tomlinson

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. — Rebecca Solnit

I teach students that what people say about failure in politics is mostly wrong. People always told me, 'They'll praise you on your way up and kick you on your way down.' That wasn't my experience. I can't walk down the street in Toronto without someone coming up and saying hello. — Michael Ignatieff

Experience everything. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The most arrogant and admired people have a special kind of ignorance that the ignorant cannot see. — Robin Sacredfire

Music deals with time and timing. It's so magical, but when you get into it, every little sound and every little space between the sounds, it's critical, so critical. And if it's not there, it not only feels wrong, but it ruins things. — David Lynch

The President of the United States thinks that for the Japanese opium is more dangerous than war. — Townsend Harris

It's still a mystery to me, but even though my mother was like an older sister to me, I kind of put her up on a pedestal. — Steven Spielberg

Words like passion and ecstasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try to turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell os a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. — Jeanette Winterson

I think you can go back in history and look at what the effect in Asia and the world was of a divided, fractured China from, you know, the opium wars through the Chinese civil war, and I don't think it was pretty for Asia or the world. — Dennis C. Blair

Some couples
most couples
waited years and years before they developed the ability to read or to feel each other so well. Then there were those very few who touched each other so deeply, so perfectly that first time that the bond was almost immediate. — Lora Leigh

Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception ... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium ... Photograph and be photographed. — Alexander Rodchenko

Animals give birth to children, so that alone is not an argument strong enough to make a human a man. Otherwise goats, dogs and pigs could beat us to the game, because they could do in one go what will take man years to accomplish. A woman can only give birth to a number of kids at a time, in a year, while some animals could give birth to as many as tens of breeds in a year. — Sunday Adelaja

I'm very competitive. When I was, like, four, I would see a Shake 'N Bake commercial and see a little girl on that and think, 'I can do that. I might be better.' — Sarah Hyland

Comradeship is part of war. Like alcohol, it is one of the great comforters and helpers for people who have to live under unbearable, inhuman conditions. It makes the intolerable tolerable. It helps us cope with filth, calamity, and death. It anaesthetizes us. It comforts us for the loss of all the amenities of civilisation. Indeed, its loss is one of its preconditions. It receives its justification from bitter necessities and terrible sacrifices. If it is separated from these, if it is exercised only for pleasure and intoxication, for its own sake, it becomes a vice. It makes no difference that it brings a certain happiness. It corrupts and depraves men like no alcohol or opium. It makes them unfit for normal, responsible civilian life. Indeed, it is at bottom, an instrument of decivilisation. The general promiscuous comradeship to which the Nazis have seduced the Germans has debased this nation as nothing else could. — Sebastian Haffner

I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me.
They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction.
With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country. — Jake Wood

In 1865, Scotsman Thomas Sutherland started the Hongkong Shanghai Banking Company (later HSBC). A senior Chinese government official had issued a warrant for future HSBC board member Thomas Dent in 1839, to close his opium warehouses. This helped spark the first Opium War. France's Le Monde Diplomatique said that "HSBC's first wealth came from opium from India, and later Yunan in China." Yunan is in the Golden Triangle area. The first Opium War forced China to cede Shanghai to Western powers, transforming it from a fishing village to China's largest, most modern city with a network of opium smoking dens. Prof. Alfred McCoy would eventually call Hong Kong "Asia's heroin laboratory," and HSBC would become the world's second largest bank. — John L. Potash

The expense of a war could be paid in time; but the expense of opium, when once the habit is formed, will only increase with time. — Townsend Harris

The very same British and American families who had combined to wreck the Indian textile industry in the promotion of the opium trade [ ... ] combined to make the trade, a valuable source of revenue. In 1864 they joined forces to create causes for war and to promote the terrible War Between the States, also known as the American Civil War. — John Coleman

I can't say what made me fall in love with Vietnam - that a woman's voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you're looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that's the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there's a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again. — Graham Greene

It's such a great feeling to make people laugh. I know I've made people cry or want to slit their wrists, but to make people laugh is a very intoxicating, wonderful thing. — Joan Allen

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name ... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase. — James Fenton