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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.

Lin Yutang

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Lin Yutang
Age: 80 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 10
Died: 1976
Died: March 26
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
Writer
Facts
World
Mystifying
Stupefying
China
Greatest
Modern
Fact

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
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I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.
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The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
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Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.
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I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.
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Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man.
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The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living.
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Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
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Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
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A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.
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The age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.
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Today we are afraid of simple words like goodness and mercy and kindness. We don't believe in the good old words because we don't believe in good old values anymore. And that's why the world is sick.
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No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.
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Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
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The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
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A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.
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Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.
Lin Yutang
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Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside he may only be disagreed with.
Lin Yutang
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What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man's liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted
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All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
Lin Yutang