Famous Quotes

"I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them."

Ma Jian on Society

More quotes about Society

• "You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."

  Mahatma Gandhi on Society

• "An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."

  Robert A. Heinlein on Society

• "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

  Jiddu Krishnamurti on Society

• "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."

  Dwight D. Eisenhower on Society

• "There is more to life than increasing its speed."

  Mahatma Gandhi on Society

More quotes by Ma Jian

• "To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons."

• "When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased."

• "My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them."