Quotes from Matthew Polly

A fight forms a powerful and strange bond between men.

Because it doesn't take much courage to fight when you still believe you can win. What takes real courage is to keep fighting when all hope is gone.

it doesn't take much courage to fight when you still believe you can win. What takes real courage is to keep fighting when all hope is gone.

Only those who have tasted the bitterest of the bitter can become people who stand out among others. -Guanchang Xianxing Ji

A club hurts the flesh, but evil words hurt the bone. -Traditional Chinese Proverb

The sayers do not know and the knowers do not say.

This was not uncommon in government-run operations, where a request that someone do their job often induced a catatonic state that might last anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour.

When you are the only laowai in a village of 10,000 Chinese martial artists and you've sat through several dozen films where a white man shouts, "You Chinese dog," before getting his ass kicked, it starts to irritate you. We all need role models.

The monks sped up the process up for us laowai who have less time, less patience for basics, and a greater need for external markers of our accomplishments.

At some point within the first month I started talking to myself, which wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that I was also answering myself. I'd never imagined how crucial English was to my sense of a unified self—part

Richard Polly, 1942–2017 "Knowing others is Wisdom, Knowing yourself is Enlightenment." —Lao-tzu

What takes real courage is to keep fighting when all hope is gone.

I knew very little about Afghanistan. Like most of my fellow countrymen, I preferred not to learn too much about dysfunctional countries until after my government invaded them. It's emotionally easier that way.

The Chinese expected the white man to pay more for his burden because the British, the Pablo Escobar of imperialists, had forced them to buy opium from India in 1850 and had stolen Hong Kong.

The North Beijing train station was a vivid example of the kind of pervasive poverty the Chinese people were willing to concede their political freedom to escape. It looked like a refugee camp after a war of ethnic cleansing. Actually, a refugee camp looks better, because at least it has Red Cross tents.

Two goals in a Maoist economy are to keep people working whether their job is necessary or not (idleness is the bourgeoisie's workshop) and to make sure everyone is keeping an eye on everyone else.

Shaolin was the first known Buddhist monastery to develop its own fighting system—quite unusual for a religion whose pacifism rivals that of the Quakers.

He had me at "hallo." No red-blooded American can resist the siren song of TV exposure. It's our God-given right.

There are few things more nerve-racking than trying to act normal with a camera in your face and someone shouting at you to "act normal.

Almost all of it was a reconstruction of recent vintage, part of the government's effort to increase tourist revenue after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

the Chinese Communist Party played only a minor role in battling the Japanese. It was the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] that bore the brunt of the heavy fighting and was significantly weakened in the process. Without the Japanese invasion, it seems improbable that the CCP could have won the "Nationalist-Communist" Civil War in 1950. But historical memory is rarely gracious, self-deprecating, or forgiving, especially in a police state.) The

Like many sons of famous men who can't live up to their fathers, Big Wang covered up his insecurity with a belligerent jocularity. Or to put it another way, he was an annoying prick who thought he was hilarious. He liked to make his power known by publicly berating