East-West Relations Quotes

The threat to Europe is for us to push Russia into China’s arms.

Germany has an interest in détente—for general European and national reasons. Here we are in accord not only with our allies … but with almost everyone. Here we join with the nations and governments of the uncommitted world. Here interests we have in common with the Communist-governed states also come to light in spite of some polemics.

The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia.

When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former.

It would be wrong to see the re-making of Asia, much less India, as a revolt against the West. Asia has indeed been re-built on the ruins of colonialism, but not on the ruins of all that the West has come to represent.

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

Many in China find it perplexing that the U.S. and Russian perceptions are still so heavily influenced by the Cold War.

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.

America must never accept as a final fact the division between East and West …

A lot of people do comedy about India, but they're not from India. It's a Kwik-E-Mart perspective. I want to provide a genuine view and maybe one on how we see the West.

The threat to Russia isn't liberal Europe or America. It is nonliberal Islam and nonliberal China. Russia has to change. It can't be otherwise. It will take time. You have to be patient.

I immediately was captured by 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist.' It gave me a springboard into contemporary Pakistan and a dialogue between Pakistan and the rest of the world.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Pearl Buck was my mother's favorite author.

'A Passage To India' by E. M. Forster - It opened my mind to a world I'd never known before.

My father loved to take us on historical vacations, and you should have seen the stares we received in East Berlin.

Dad's astute knowledge of foreign policy impressed Gorbachev during the time of the Berlin Wall when Dad refused to gloat during the reunification of Germany.

I always was fascinated with China, because I was born in Europe, and for us, China had this fascination and mystery. The first time I came here was in 1989. They were on bicycles, and the speed of the growth has been incredible.

With its declining population, with people moving out of the Far East, with an enormously powerful China in the east, I think the real destiny of Russia is to become closer to the West.

A Russia that gradually begins to gravitate toward the West will also be a Russia that ceases to disrupt the international system.

Once this key conflict is eased, it will have a huge impact on the world. It will take time to find a solution. It's similar to the situation between East and the West at the time of my flight.

East and West are coming together. Whether in peace or anarchy - they are coming together. There needn't be a clash between East and West, between Islam and Europe.

If the 1988 Seoul Olympics was 'reconciliation Olympics' amid the cold war between East and West and the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics was a touchstone of peace, the 2032 Olympics will be promoted to become the last stop to establish the peace.

I'm conscious of the fact that I'm sort of a bridging figure. I have my Chinese literary heritage and cultural background, so I'm comfortable with these things, but at the same time, I have to navigate the Anglo-American tradition, which has a self-centred view of what Asia and what being Chinese means.

The American understanding of China is filtered through years of politics; we rarely see the culture on its own terms.