Han Suyin Quotes

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.

If we're to have a future in the 21st century, we'll want to be able to say, "Now what was the 20th century like in the United States of America, the most powerful of all countries of that century? What was it like to be an ordinary person?"

People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.

Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of 11 September 2001 are not exception.

Tragedy was a big social event, and everyone wanted in on it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes.

I think there was a long period of time when we got real invested in a youth culture, and not coincidentally it was when the baby boomers, who let's face it, take up a lot of space on the planet, were young.

The impact of television on our culture is. . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.

Every generation thinks the cultural rot during their time is worse than it's ever been. That's not true.

It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.

No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time

In the 21st century, culture is power.

I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I would say to that is, we tend to think of historical periods and historical mores as ending a lot more concretely than they do. Like, in an Austen novel, there are lots of reasons - cultural, moral, religious - why the characters don't have sex during courtship. Maybe, even though those reasons have kind of expired, historically, they're still around in some sense.

The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.

I have a magnificent obsession. All I want to do is change the world ...make it a better place for this and future generations.

Sometimes to think about why some institutions are stable, it's interesting to go one generation back and look at the author of that stability.

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times.

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society’s weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future.

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.

One song isn't going to ever change things, but I suppose it's the accumulation of music generally [that is]. If you can imagine a world that has no music in it, it would be a very different world, so music does change the world by virtue of all the music in it. Cumulative music of every kind, from banging a drum to playing a flute or recording symphonies, or singing 'War, what is it good for?' All those things change the whole way we live.