Quotes & Sayings About Southeast Asia

For many years, the proposed influenza epicenter has been thought to be Southeast Asia. Farming practices there bring pigs, fowl, and people into close contact, allowing swine, avian, and human flu viruses to mix. The cycle is thought to be birds to pigs to humans. — Elizabeth T. Murane

Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be. — Anthony Bourdain

I sort of wanted to reveal this other side of Asia: Southeast Asia, where the Chinese have been wealthy for generations and have different ways of relating to money. I wanted to sort of reveal this world to readers. — Kevin Kwan

The U.S. has strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured. Holding Indochina is essential to securing these interests. Therefore, we must hold Indochina. — Noam Chomsky

The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or southern Africa - from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against aids - can affect Americans. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream now. — Shashi Tharoor

Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable. — R. W. Apple

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the U.S. against a poor southeast Asian country was seen every night on television. — Tariq Ali

I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself. — Gerry Abbey

To most Europeans, I guess, America now looks like the most dangerous country in the world. Since America is unquestionably the most powerful country, the transformation of America's image within the last thirty years is very frightening for Europeans. It is probably still more frightening for the great majority of the human race who are neither Europeans nor North Americans, but are Latin Americans, Asians and Africans. They, I imagine, feel even more insecure than we feel. They feel that, at any moment, America may intervene in their internal affairs with the same appalling consequences as have followed from American intervention in Southeast Asia. — L. Fletcher Prouty

I love Southeast Asia. As a child, I lived in that part of the world. My first time in Burma was in 1958 with my parents. — Muhtar Kent

The stories surrounding eating durians remind us that literature should incorporate low culture, bringing it closer to lived reality. These legends come not from the pens of the elite, but are assembled from the words of the masses, both written and spoken, passed from one person to another - the only way to create a text this deep and compelling. — Wong Yoon Wah

With a population of more than 600 million people, an emerging middle class that is driving strong consumption, and a robust and resilient economy, Southeast Asia presents a compelling growth opportunity for Starbucks. — Howard Schultz

In Southeast Asia the world is understood to be a vast, complex network of interdependent relationships. So when global capitalism makes it impossible for small-time rice farmers to feed their families and make a living, it is a natural thing for anyone in the family who can find an alternative source of income to do so. — John Burdett

When I left America I understood the formation of public opinion in Southeast Asia. I had had the best course possible, taught by a famous Asian expert. Two minutes at Chulalongkorn taught me that I might just as profitably have studied the zither. — Carol Hollinger

In the end, we lost IndoChina to the communists. But we did not lose Southeast Asia. — William Westmoreland

As the leader of Southeast Asia's oldest democracy, I am always keen to share our experiences. In the half-century since independence, we have found that steady reform is the best way to secure lasting stability. It is a process that continues in Malaysia to this day. — Najib Razak

It has been hard to muster the resources to support fledgling democracies- or to help the world's most desperate - the AIDS orphan in Uganda, the refugee fleeing Zimbabwe, the young woman who has been trafficked into the sex trade in Southeast Asia; the world's poorest in Haiti. Yet this assistance - together with the compassionate works of private charities - people of conscience and people of faith - has shown the soul of our country. — Condoleezza Rice

In 1978, 'Time' magazine sent me to do a story about children in Southeast Asia fathered by American GIs. What I saw was very upsetting, but the story they published was whitewashed. — Rick Smolan

As the CIA tried to find itself, the threat of international terrorism emanating from the Middle East, Africa, North Africa and Central and Southeast Asia grew with each strike: the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. — Michael Hastings

I just like the people and the culture of Southeast Asia. — Jim Webb

Contrary to the general picture of the decline of Asia and the rise of the West, the Chinese economy was buoyant in the eighteenth century, developing its own local variations and with trade links across Southeast Asia. Silk, porcelain and tea from China continued to be in great demand in Europe (and in the American colonies) even though in 1760 the Chinese confined all Western traders to the port city of Canton. Tribute-paying neighbours as near as Burma, Nepal and Vietnam (and as far away as Java) upheld Beijing's solipsistic view that the Chinese emperor, presiding over the central kingdom of the world, had the right to rule 'all under heaven. — Pankaj Mishra

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. — Martin Luther King Jr.

If I'd been alone, I wouldn't have eaten at all. I'd have taken a shower, thrown on an oversize T-shirt, and gone to bed surrounded by a few select penguins. Now I had a fancy dinner to eat, by candlelight nonetheless. If I said I wasn't hungry, would he be insulted? Would he pout? Would he yell about all the work going to waste and tell me about starving kids in Southeast Asia? "Shit," I said softly and with feeling. Well, hell, if we ever were going to cohabitate, he'd have to know the truth. I was unsociable, and food was something you ate so you wouldn't die. I — Laurell K. Hamilton

Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door. — Eric Hansen

I thanked the President [George W. Bush] for the steadfastness and resolve with which he's tackling the very complicated problems in the Middle East and Iraq, as well as the Israel-Palestinian issue ... It's critical for us in Southeast Asia that America does that ... because it affects America's standing in Asia and the world, and also the security environment in Asia because extremists, the jihadists, watch carefully what's happening in the Middle East and take heart, or lose heart, depending on what's happening. — Lee Hsien Loong

But all that's hugely unlikely
with the exception of mosquito bites and sunburn. And yet even experienced travelers are still afraid.
"What everyone forgets
even me
is the people who actually live here. In places like Central America, I mean. Southeast Asia. India. Africa. Millions, even billions, of people, who live out their whole lives in these places
the places so many people like us fear. Think about it: they ride chicken buses to work every day. Their clothes are always damp. Their whole lives, they never escape the dust and the heat. But they deal with all these discomforts. They have to.
"So why can't travelers? If we've got the means to get here, we owe it to the country we're visiting not to treat it like an amusement park, sanitized for our comfort. It's insulting to the people who live here. People just trying to have the best lives they can, with the hands they've been dealt. — Kirsten Hubbard

History shows that you can't - you can't have security in Southeast Asia without security in Northeast Asia. It's just the reality. — Jim Webb

As young West Point cadets, our motto was 'duty, honor, country.' But it was in the field, from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the sands of the Middle East, that I learned that motto's fullest meaning. There I saw gallant young Americans of every race, creed and background fight, and sometimes die, for 'duty, honor, and their country.' — Norman Schwarzkopf

Seriously, just have the gonads to quote yourself! ^^ — T.F. Rhoden

What business could be mature when you have economies with more than 2 billion people in India, China and Southeast Asia? — Jack Welch

The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends. — J. William Fulbright

In opening China, the English have secured their presence in East Asia. If we don't commit more resources to get into Southeast Asia now, they or Germany, or even little Belgium might find it ripe for the taking. — Jules Ferry

There is a possibly apocryphal story that in Southeast Asia, people catch monkeys by placing a banana in a box with a hole in the bottom and hanging the box from a tree. The monkey reaches in and grabs the banana but is unable to withdraw its hand. The clenched fist holding the banana is too big to fit through the hole. To escape, all the monkey has to do is release the banana. Sometimes, the monkeys hold on for a long time and are then captured. People, too, often give up their freedom by holding on to things too long. — Carl Greer

No matter the border, the Mekong has been an indiscriminate giver and taker of life in Southeast Asia for thousands of years. It's a paradox like civilization's other great rivers - be it the Nile, Indus, Euphrates, Ganges or China's Sorrow the Huang He - for without its waters life is a daily struggle for survival; yet with its waters life is a daily bet that natural disasters and diseases will visit someone else's village, because it's not if, but when it's going to happen that's the relevant question. — Tucker Elliot

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide. — Gerry Abbey

You know, we did a good job in containing the Soviet Union, but we made a lot of mistakes. We supported really nasty guys, we did some things that we are not particularly proud of, from Latin America to Southeast Asia. But we did have a kind of overarching framework about what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. That was our objective. We achieved it. — Hillary Clinton

While Keith Taylor, then, might dismiss questions of "whether Vietnam 'belongs' to Southeast Asia or [North] East Asia" as "probably the least enlightening in Vietnamese studies," it could equally be argued that it is precisely Vietnam's historical, geographical, and cultural location at the frontier of different, identifiable, and historically sedimented cultural formations that makes its situation so distinctive and interesting. — David Craig

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public. — Rick Perlstein

The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods, of too low a quality, at too high a price. The resultant stagnation led to snide comments about what Indian economist Raj Krishna called the "Hindu rate of growth," which averaged some 3.5 percent in the first three decades after independence (or, to be more exact, between 1950 and 1980) when other countries in Southeast Asia were growing at 8 to 15 percent or even more. — Shashi Tharoor

Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member ... , or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone. — Daniel Schorr

There's so much emphasis on the economic might of China, of Southeast Asia, Asian 'Super Tigers' and things like that. But nobody was really looking from the perspective of a family story, of these individuals. — Kevin Kwan

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer! — Gerry Abbey

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this. — Peter Agre

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. — Geoff Dyer

You are slowly developing some multinationals of your own. We certainly hope that some of them will look in this direction when they look for opportunities because the progress of Southeast Asia is important to China, just as China's progress is important to us. — Sellapan Ramanathan

For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, 'We came in peace for all Mankind.' As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. — Carl Sagan

Southeast Asia is an area in which there is a form of Islam which is both devout and progressive, and therefore to be supported. It's an area in which I see a congruence of American interests and local interests: to have tolerant societies and become more prosperous. — Dennis C. Blair

So is America over? A long time ago we "lost" China, we've lost Southeast Asia, we've lost South America. Maybe we'll lose the Middle East and North African countries. Is America over? It's a kind of paranoia, but it's the paranoia of the superrich and superpowerful. If you don't have everything, it's a disaster. — Noam Chomsky

The European Tour plays all over the world: from the U.K. to China, from Korea to South Africa, and from the Middle East to southeast Asia. — Peter Uihlein

In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She's a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy. — Barry Humphries

When outsiders stare into the void that is today's North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has been lost dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road - the skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country. — Barbara Demick

Southeast Asia is now a region full of hope because of the freedoms America has helped foster. — Khaleda Zia

I've always liked Southeast Asia a lot. It's a wonderful place, an easy place. People are great, there's a lot of history and culture, and I like the serenity of Buddhism there. It's very beautiful. I find that to be a very nice place to visit. — Matt Dillon

have become even more sought-after as a high-end party "drug"; at clubs in southeast Asia, — Elizabeth Kolbert

It's hard for me to think about this, but I first went to Southeast Asia as a Marine more than 40 years ago, as a young Marine. I was on Okinawa and then in Vietnam. I've returned in many different hats, which I think has helped me to form my own views about policy out there. I've spent a good bit of time in this region as a journalist. — Jim Webb

Vast quantities of U.S. bombers, tanks and guns have been sent against Ho Chi Minh and his freedom-fighters; and now we are told that soon it will be 'advisable' to send America GI's into Indo-China in order that the tin, rubber and tungsten of Southeast Asia be kept by the "free world"-meaning white Imperialism . — Paul Robeson

Perhaps the strongest signal of reengagement with Southeast Asia was the U.S.'s accession to the Southeast Asian Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. — Benigno Aquino III

VW's future is increasingly being decided in China, Russia, India, the Americas and Southeast Asia. This is where we will generate most of our growth in future. — Martin Winterkorn

And the peanut butter-eaters on Earth were preparing to conquer the shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time, the Earthlings hadn't just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again.

They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping, and determined that they were too numerous and proud and resourceful ever to allow themselves to be pioneered.

So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the majority in very respect.

Then the Earthling armored space ships came and discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the pioneering began. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees. — E.F. Schumacher

Southeast Asia food uses many different types of spices which are quite new to me, like the curry leaves which I saw at the Kreta Ayer wet market in Chinatown. With such spices used in cooking, this usually imparts a strong aroma to Southeast Asian food, which appeals to the senses. — Joel Robuchon

On the unofficial level it was a glorious moment in our national life because young people decided that this had to stop, that they could no longer stand the shedding of blood in this tragic adventure in Southeast Asia. — William Kunstler

Old money in Southeast Asia is much more discrete and low key. It's about not wearing brand names. It's about being invisible, almost. The billionaire can be taking the bus with you. — Kevin Kwan

I'm a child of the sixties, I'm a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution. — Curt Flood

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors - that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me. — Anthony Bourdain