Ma Yansong Quotes

What we saw in Tiananmen Square 31 years ago was a massacre, a massacre of innocent people that came from Hong Kong but also Chinese people to protest.

I was a college student in 1989 when I participated in the demonstration at Tiananmen Square. I was one of the organizers.

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.

Comrade Deng Xiaoping - along with other party elders - gave the party leadership their firm and full support to put down the political disturbance using forceful measures.

Tiananmen did not fail.

I often traveled to Nicaragua to speak against repressive policies by the Sandinista government.

In the spring and summer of 1989, a serious political disturbance took place in China.

You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.

I don't think there's any serious discussion inside the Chinese government about liberalising. I don't think anything's going to change in China until enough Chinese say, 'We're not going to play this game any more.'

I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel.

I've never conspired to overthrow the government; all I did was report on the Arab Spring and suggest that something similar might happen in Ethiopia if the authoritarian regime didn't reform.

Somehow I feel a little bit odd in Tiananmen Square because I was a soldier, in a uniform, watching those leaders and tanks, and I was part of them.

Ever since I took to the streets when I was 17 to protest at great personal risk against the communist dictatorship, I have been a passionate democrat.

I believe that the Tibetans should have the right to control their own destinies and decide for themselves whether they want to be part of China or not. But this view isn't shared by most Chinese, or even the leaders of most Western democracies. As long as the Communist Party is in power, there is little hope for Tibet.

If I was a Greek citizen I'd be out there trying to bring down this monstrosity that has been put upon those people.

The tea has been thrown overboard. The revolution of 1860 has been initiated.

Revolts, republics, revolutions, most no graver than a schoolboy’s barring out.

Disruption of the New Left

There is a revolution in Germany, and we must ask ourselves, "Is there a revolution in the university?" No. The fighting is still in the skirmishing stage.

I am against revolutions. We have had negative experience with coups and rallies in the past. We remember the shooting at the White House in Moscow The new Russian protest is the most beautiful, most peaceful, most intelligent protest in the world—not a single broken window, not a single burned care or victim.

If we can’t sit at the table of democracy, then we’ll knock the fucking legs off. But before we tear it completely down, they will move to build a better one, rather than see this one destroyed.

I'd fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so.

While the 2011 revolution did not remove the regime, it has shortened the seemingly endless patience that many Egyptians once had for military rule.