Wong Kar-wai Quotes

I can understand the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse-tung.

There have been 50 or 60 books written about Empress Orchid, but none of them bothered to really examine the period in China when she lived. I was taught that she was evil; it's in all the textbooks.

I love general history. That's all I read really. I don't read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that's really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.

1936 is a very important year: a golden time for martial arts, right before the Japanese invasion.

When I looked into the lives of the Chinese saints, I discovered that many of them had died during the Boxer Rebellion, a war that occurred on Chinese soil in the year 1900.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Father of the Republic, made it his great aim in his revolutionary leadership to secure freedom and equality of status for China among the nations of the world.

In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.

I finished 'American Born Chinese' in 2005, so after that, I started actively researching the Boxer Rebellion.

At regular intervals in Chinese history it suffers complete collapse and the central government disintegrates.

Even the bones of their dead should be dug up and scattered.

I never did begin the war with the two Houses of Parliament... They began war upon me... if anybody will look at the dates of what happened... they will see clearly that they began these unhappy troubles, not I... therefore I tell you I am the martyr of the people.

In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.

You know how absurd is the fiction put forward by our enemies in the Northern states that the great Civil War which raged between 1861 and 1865 would never have taken place but for Jefferson Davis and myself. Such mighty convulsions, which amount indeed to revolutions, are never the work of individuals, but of divided nations.

Civil war was taught them [Americans] that "the sacred right of insurrection" is as much out of place in a democratic state as in an aristocratic or a monarchical state; and that the government should always be clothed with ample authority to arrest and punish whoever plots its destruction.

The thousands of men who had died in the civil wars had given their lives to little discernable effect.

The Chinese Republic stands upon a base of sand, that the moderate men are looking forward to the re-establishment of a monarchy, the army to a military despotism or extended anarchy, the provinces to autonomy, and the robber Powers around China to spoliation on a scale even bigger than has hitherto been possible. Young China's friends have served the honest members of the party badly, by persuading Europe and America to accept as genuine the elaborate sham which has been erected, by talking of the solidity of the Republic and the acquiescence of the people.

Half of all civil wars are post conflict relapses.

We have lived six centuries in six years. Let not this costly experience be lost on you. It is time to profit by the crimes of the monarchy, the errors of the Constituent Assembly, the vacillations and eccentricities of the Legislative Assembly, the misdeeds of the decemviral tyranny, the calamities of anarchy, and the misfortunes of civil war.

The members of the English Parliament are fond of comparing themselves to the old Romans...(but) here follows a more essential difference between Rome and England, which gives the advantage entirely to the later-viz., that the civil wars of Rome ended in slavery, and those of the English in liberty.

The student of French history will recall three systems which have tried to deal with this admitted passion of the French people. The Bourbons crushed it; the Orleanists snubbed it; the Bonapartes deceived it.

We will cut off his head with the crown upon it.

… something with monarchical power in it would be most effectual for the settlement of the nation

Democracy, which has flourished even in the polluted soil of Europe, would certainly thrive in the virgin soil of America. Here there is no real element of aristocracy, nothing but a sorry caricature. There are not then, my dear general, elements of monarchy in this land of God. Let a republic be formed here and dignity will grow in men... A monarchy established here would be of short duration, for an idea, once implanted in the people, is impossible to extinguish; and the idea of democracy has been firmly rooted here during twelve years of glorious struggle

England was never more happy before, nor much more since, than after the head of the first Stuart [King Charles I] was severed from his body, and while it was under the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell.

Some civil wars are caused by one group within a country seeking its independence, while in other cases, the civil war itself leads one group or another to seek its independence as the solution to its problems.