YellowG

“During the eleventh century, men at the court of Song Dynasty China came to imagine in a new way the political entity to which they belonged. They started to articulate with far greater precision its spatial extent – which they now saw as bounded by natural topographic features as well as by the historical Great Wall – while simultaneously de-emphasizing an older theory of sovereignty premised on the idea of universal empire.”
― Nicolas Tackett, The Origins of the Chinese Nation: Song China and the Forging of an East Asian World Order

“Like all Chinese youth, the first sentence he’d learned in school was “Long live Chairman Mao!” To be carrying out the chairman’s orders gave the precocious eleven-year-old a powerful sense of purpose and self-worth. “The more ruthless we are to enemies, the more we love the people,” the team would chant together.”
― John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China

“The idioms also revealed that Chinese shared a barnyard bawdiness with American English. My favorite was “taking off your pants to fart”—wasted effort.”
― John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China

“Players from Sweden, Lebanon, and China, for instance, have a reputation for being more aggressive than those from France, England, or India. Younger players are presumed to be looser and more aggressive than older ones. Men are assumed to be more likely to bluff than women. These stereotypes, like any others, are not always true: at the hold ’em games I used to play in at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the best players were very often women, and they were good in part because they were much more aggressive than their opponents assumed.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction