Ma Jian Quotes
The Chinese have made a faustian pact with the government, agreeing to forsake demands for political and intellectual freedom in exchange for more material comfort. They live prosperous lives in which any expression of pain is forbidden.

Quotes to Explore
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I've been a novelist since 1995 and have had novels in and out of option, and watching that process just made me realize that I have to live by what I teach my students, because I teach screenwriting at Spellman.
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I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.
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Humanity will live as long as there are humans.
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He that can live alone resembles the brute beast in nothing, the sage in much, and God in everything.
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Our founders never intended us to have a professional political class.
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We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
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'The View' was so much fun. So much fun because the audience was 85-percent fans that wanted to be there celebrating 'One Life to Live' and the other 15 percent were crew members from 'One Life to Live'. It was just really, really wonderful and the clips were wonderful.
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Our government just won't enforce civil rights laws. The laws will be ignored.
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Migration - whether emigration or return - at the micro level is an individual choice, and government both at the Centre and the states have role only to facilitate the decision of the individuals.
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Gentrification always makes me laugh. People complain about traffic. Live in Atlanta! You can't have it both ways; you can't live in an incredible city and not expect it to get congested.
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Our forefathers used to live longer and healthy lives.
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No government, no organisation, no citizen can afford to be less than vigilant in combating bigotry, intolerance and hatred. And frankly, our way of life depends on that vigilance.
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That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.
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I've dreamed of being on the road, traveling and touring, for as long as I've been into doing music. It's what I live for. I just wanna be Willie Nelson.
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The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate - which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.
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I understand how bureaucracies work. And that's important because our government has become a vast, huge, bloated, corrupt bureaucracy.
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In the '90s, there was scant presidential leadership and insufficient domestic political mobilization for foreign policy grounded in human rights.
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I always want to go back and do stand-up; I like the freedom.
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The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.
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Although the Jeffersonian Law ("All men are created equal") is the first article of the American faith, the facts of American life have demonstrated for some time now that it is an irksome faith to live by.
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The middle class in the rich countries is where the political game is being played. They are voting in elections in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. They are working people in the upper part of the global income distribution. They might on average be happy that the Chinese are doing well, but they are not happy that the Chinese are doing well relative to them.
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The changes are coming so quickly it's been difficult for workers to retrain themselves and for entrepreneurs to figure out where the next opportunities may be. The catalyst is something called computer learning or artificial intelligence - the ability to feed massive amounts of data into supercomputers and program them to teach themselves and improve their performance.
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The toad, without which no garden would be complete.
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The Chinese have made a faustian pact with the government, agreeing to forsake demands for political and intellectual freedom in exchange for more material comfort. They live prosperous lives in which any expression of pain is forbidden.