Sun Yat Sen Quotes

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milošević and Karadžić were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina.

The World is for All

Soarele e pentru mine revoluția din Franța, din America Fraternitatea, egalitatea, libertatea, Democrația, Marseillaise, Internaționala, Washington, Lenin, Sun Yat-sen Numele tuturor acelora ce vor să scape de mizeria omenească.

The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit...they are just a heap of loose sand...Other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat. China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable. Class war is not the cause of social progress; it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. The cause of the disease is the inability to subsist, and the result of the disease is war. Sun Yat-sen

They had been able to criticise the Beijing government publicly without fear of retribution. In 1929, a number of prominent liberals spoke out in a collection of essays called On Human Rights. Hu Shih, the leading liberal of the day, wrote that his fellow countrymen had already been through a ‘liberation of the mind’, but now ‘the collaboration of the Communists and the Nationalists has created a situation of absolute dictatorship and our freedoms of thought and speech are being lost. Today we may disparage God, but may not criticise Sun Yat-sen. We don’t have to go to Sunday church services, but we have to attend the weekly [Sun] Commemorative Service and read the Sun Yat-sen Testament.’ ‘The freedom we want to establish is the freedom to criticise the Nationalist party and to criticise Sun Yat-sen. Even the Almighty can be criticised, why can’t the Nationalists and Sun Yat-sen?’ And, ‘The Nationalist government is deeply unpopular, partly because its political system fell far short of people’s expectations, and partly because its corpse-like ideology failed to

Rusia es Rusia, y es mejor no irritarla. La historia no se escribe en un día ni en una batalla. Hay que verla siempre con perspectiva.

Pertenecer a una generación significa compartir un mundo similar, tener empatía por asuntos similares que conciernen al mundo, disfrutar de la vida según parecidos razonamientos, coincidir en modas y criterios.

Ahora ya puedes decir que eres discípulo de Confucio. Sabes cómo abrir una puerta empleando la llave adecuada, y me lo has demostrado.

los signos y síntomas vinculados a la alteración negativa de alguno de los órganos principales, y la muy directa relación de cada uno de ellos con una emoción: el estómago con la confusión, el hígado con la ira, el riñón con el miedo, el pulmón con la tristeza, el bazo y el páncreas con la preocupación y el corazón con la alegría.

La realidad es lo palpable, los comunistas ahora hablamos de cosas concretas, salario garantizado, paz social, vivienda para la familia, educación para los hijos, hospitales del Estado, una jubilación suficiente para seguir viviendo de lo que te quede, todo ello pesará siempre más que las románticas entelequias de los nacionalistas: los viejos trajes regionales, el himno de la patria chica, los bailes en la plaza del pueblo, la fiesta nacional

La gente se ha acostumbrado a vivir sometida, bajo la dictadura, a no ser libre, y lo único que al final le preocupa es el dinero. En todo caso los chinos no hemos sido nunca libres, no hemos probado jamás el sabor de la libertad, ¿es amarga o dulce? No sabemos a qué sabe, ni siquiera estamos seguros de que exista. Nos conformamos con la miseria, con pasar hambre, pero al menos seguir vivos un día más, a malvivir, a que no haya educación para nuestros hijos como lo más normal. A fin de cuentas, ¿para qué querrían educarse? ¿Para ser tan infelices como yo? ¿Para comprobar que nunca se cumplen los sueños? ¡No! Al final la verdad es que es mejor la existencia amarga, la vida mediocre, esa miseria que sabe a lodo y a pescado podrido, al hediondo perfume de las letrinas, que ninguna existencia, y el que cree lo contrario termina colgándose de una viga. ¿A quién le importaría?

On February 12, 1912, the Empress Regent abdicated on behalf of the dynasty. China was now a Republic. As such she was welcomed by Joint Resolution of the United States Congress: “Whereas the Chinese Nation has successfully asserted that sovereignty resides in the people” and whereas the American people are “inherently and by tradition sympathetic to all efforts to adopt representative government,” therefore the United States “congratulates the people of China on their assumption of the powers, duties and responsibilities of self-government” in the hope that under a republican form of government “…the happiness of the Chinese people will be secure and the progress of the country insured.” It was not to be that simple. Yuan Shih-kai remained in control of north China, which he withheld from accession to the Republican regime. He maneuvered and waited. Lacking united support or firm authority or a reliable military arm, Sun Yat-sen could not prevail. More negotiations ensued with unavoidable result. On March 12, 1912, Dr. Sun retired as President in favor of Yuan Shih-kai, who reestablished the Government at Peking. In this unstable mongrel resolution China’s modern age began.

The sum of Henry’s Japanese friends happened to be a number that rhymed with ‘hero’. His father wouldn’t allow it. He was a Chinese nationalist and had been quite a firebrand in his day, according to Henry’s mother. In his early teens, his father had played host to the famed revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen when he visited Seattle to raise money to help the fledgling Kuomintang army fight the Manchus. First through war bonds, then he’d helped them open up an actual office. Imagine that, an office for the Chinese army, right down the street. It was there that Henry’s father kept busy raising thousands of dollars to fight the Japanese back home. His home, not mine, Henry thought.

Bell next mentioned the Sun Yat-sen ceremony and the other snags which entangled a registered school. "Church history shows that each age has its testing and that whenever the church has compromised with the world, it has suffered loss of power and usefulness

On another level, by the Root-Takahira Treaty of 1908, Japan and the United States agreed to support the status quo in the Pacific as well as the independence and “integrity” of China and maintaining the “Open Door” to international trade there. The Japanese interpreted the pact as de facto recognition of their predominant influence in Korea and Manchuria. Japanese expansionism took a more direct form with the outbreak of World War I. Japan, which had had a treaty with Great Britain since 1902, immediately seized Germany’s concessions in China. Shortly after, Japanese forces took Germany’s island possessions in the Pacific: Palau, the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshalls. While Europe clawed at its vitals in the stalemated trenches of France, Japan in 1915 sought to strengthen itself on the Asian mainland with the humbling Twenty-One Demands upon China. These would have made China all but a Japanese protectorate and given the Empire a free hand in southern Manchuria even to Mongolia. China, beset by Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, had no recourse but to submit.

the trouble is that there is little the dead can do; otherwise they wouldn’t be the dead. No! But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless. They are powerless only to give the full answer to the new questions posed for the living by history. But they try! Whenever they hear the imperious cries of the people in a crisis, the dead respond. Right now in this country, with its many national groups, all the old heroes are being called back to life—Jefferson, Jackson, Pulaski, Garibaldi, Booker T. Washington, Sun Yat-sen, Danny O’Connell, Abraham Lincoln and countless others are being asked to step once again upon the stage of history. I can’t say too emphatically that we stand at a terminal point in history, at a moment of supreme world crisis. Destruction lies ahead unless things are changed. And things must be changed. And changed by the people.

The Chinese people have only family and clan groups; there is no national spirit. Consequently, in spite of four hundred million people gathered together in one China, we are in fact but a sheet of loose sand . . . Our position is extremely perilous; if we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred million into a strong nation, we face a tragedy—the loss of our country and the destruction of our race.” —Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), president of the Republic of China

For much of the Communist era, scholars tended to look back on Sun as one more unsuccessful, reform-minded leader, and his Three People’s Principles as just another of modern China’s many dead-end political experiments. As one biographer wrote: “If Sun Yat-sen had one consistent talent, it was for failure.