Evan Osnos > Quotes

“Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path, but once people begin to pass, a way appears.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you … That’s why I’ve come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“It is more difficult to choke the mouth of the people than to block the flow of a river.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“THE PAST DOES NOT EQUAL THE FUTURE. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. CREATE MIRACLES.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In Silicon Valley, it’s common to hear the prediction that artificial intelligence will yield a world of two broad classes: those who tell the AI what to do and those whom the AI tells what to do.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“On a per-capita basis, Americans from small towns were more than twice as likely to die at war in the years after September 11 than Americans in big cities were.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“One of the arguments that authoritarian governments use to ward off the call for greater political freedom is to argue that American-style democracy is no guarantee of good policy.... Over the years, I’ve grown used to these arguments, and my response has rarely wavered: Sure, we might make dumb choices sometimes, but we will defend, to the end, the right to make choices at all, because we believe that our collective conscience, freely expressed, will eventually lead us in the right direction. When it comes to guns, it is getting harder to muster that argument abroad. Every new shooting, every new failure of will and citizenship, slashes another hole in our credibility as a way of life.”
― Evan Osnos

“In most countries, the long-term effects of kleptocracy are easy to predict: economists calculate that for every point that a nation’s corruption rises on a scale of one to ten, its economic growth drops by 1 percent.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Approximately 117 million people earned, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one percent had nearly tripled.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Over the centuries, Americans have tacked between sanctifying the individual and celebrating community, between self-interest and social obligation, between the imagined ideals of the lone cowboy on the frontier and of the wagon train that relies on mutual aid. Alexis de Tocqueville took note of that tension and saw their coexistence as an American talent, which he called “self-interest rightly understood.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“With so many thinkers “spending so much energy fighting over words and ink, we have forgotten to criticize government authority; we have forgotten to pay attention to social welfare. That should worry us.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history—and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In 2016, the National Bureau of Economic Research published an analysis by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“On the ground where I grew up, some of America’s powerful people championed a version of capitalism that liberates wealth from responsibility.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Americans tend to see themselves in control of their fate, while Chinese see fate as something external,” Lam, the professor, said. “To alter fate, the Chinese feel they need to do things to acquire more luck.” In surveys, Chinese casino gamblers tend to view bets as investments and investments as bets. The stock market and real estate, in the Chinese view, are scarcely different from a casino. The behavioral scientists Elke Weber and Christopher Hsee have compared Chinese and American approaches to financial risk. In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested—with a series of hypothetical financial decisions—the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“He wrote of a country called “C,” ruled by “chunky and witless gluttons” who “spend two hundred billion yuan on drinking and dining and an equal amount on the military budget every year.” Unlike journalists who had to heed the directives from the Department, Ai Weiwei was something new; he had no job from which to be fired for speaking out.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested—with a series of hypothetical financial decisions—the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In 1963, John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist and adviser to the Kennedys, mocked the modern conservative for being engaged in “one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is, the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“One-sixth of the world’s population speaks Chinese. Why are we studying English?” he asked. He turned and gestured to a row of foreign teachers seated glumly behind him. “Because we pity them for not being able to speak Chinese!” The crowd roared.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In 1998 a local publisher translated Paul Fussell’s 1982 cultural satire, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which makes such observations as “the more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.” In Chinese, the satire fell away, and the book sold briskly as a field guide for the new world. “Just having money will not win you universal acclaim, respect, or appreciation,” the translator wrote in the introduction. “What your consumption reveals about you is the more critical issue.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Paying for power was so common that in 2012 the Modern Chinese Dictionary, the national authority on language, was compelled to add the word maiguan—“to buy a government promotion.” In some cases, the options read like a restaurant menu. In a small town in Inner Mongolia, the post of chief planner was sold for $103,000. The municipal party secretary was on the block for $101,000. It followed a certain logic: in weak democracies, people paid their way into office by buying votes; in a state where there were no votes to buy, you paid the people who doled out the jobs. Even the military was riddled with patronage; commanders received a string of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers beneath them. A one-star general could reportedly expect to receive ten million dollars in gifts and business deals; a four-star commander stood to earn at least fifty million. Every country has corruption, but China’s was approaching a level of its own. For those at the top, the scale of temptation had reached a level unlike anything ever encountered in the West. It was not always easy to say which Bare-Handed Fortunes were legitimate and which were not, but political office was a reliable pathway to wealth on a scale of its own. By 2012 the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Americans had been attacked more than twice as many times by far-right terrorists as they had by Islamic terrorists, yet when researchers in 2016 asked people to estimate the share of Muslims in the country, Americans, on average, estimated one in six. The real number was one in a hundred.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“Today, no sector exemplifies more clearly the threat of bigness to democracy than Big Tech.” He added, “When a concentrated”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“As I traveled between Clarksburg and Chicago in that year of election, I was sometimes struck that, for all their differences, Black Chicagoans and white Appalachians had come to share a sensation that was calcifying in America’s political culture—a feeling of being trapped by an undertow of economics and history, of being ill-served by institutions, of being estranged from a political machinery that was refined, above all, to serve itself.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“The commander of a mighty army can be captured, but the aspiration of an ordinary man can never be seized. —Confucius”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Mao sanctified propaganda and censorship as essential parts of Thought Work, and he relied on them to reframe the Long March as a strategic triumph, not a crushing defeat.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Alfani notes a pattern that unfolds “repeatedly and systematically across history”: when economic elites become ingrown, impenetrable, and “insensitive to the plight of the masses,” societies tend to become unstable.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“The media is under attack now. They wonder, Is the court system next? Do we go from ‘fake news’ to ‘fake evidence’? For people whose existence depends on enforceable contracts, this is life or death.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“The growth of a tree depends on the climate, but I make my own weather. I control my own fate,” he wrote, adding, “You can’t change the starting point of your life, but with study and hard work, you can change the endpoint!”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China