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Andre
is currently reading
read in July 2015
Andre said:
"
This really does feel like collection of short stories.Sure, it is a full book, but the differing chapters often do not feel connected apart from the same characters being in it. But nonetheless, the novel is well written and by the time I read it, i ...more "
progress:
(page 29 of 320)
"A dragon called gui that brings floods and catastrophes. I find nothing in this regard online. It could be that it exists or maybe has another name. I found the Jiaolong who is sometimes referred to as a scalded (aka hornless) or flood dragon." — 1 hour, 34 min ago
"A dragon called gui that brings floods and catastrophes. I find nothing in this regard online. It could be that it exists or maybe has another name. I found the Jiaolong who is sometimes referred to as a scalded (aka hornless) or flood dragon." — 1 hour, 34 min ago
progress:
(page 241 of 288)
"I guess I can consider myself lucky that only now in the resumee does he speak about power again. Albeit it is once more clear how much he focuses on the KMT when it comes to all of this. He never seems to consider that discourses during Japanese times might have influenced Taiwan, instead he always refers to the Qing times and the 20/30s republican times from "the mainland."" — Dec 17, 2025 04:45AM
"I guess I can consider myself lucky that only now in the resumee does he speak about power again. Albeit it is once more clear how much he focuses on the KMT when it comes to all of this. He never seems to consider that discourses during Japanese times might have influenced Taiwan, instead he always refers to the Qing times and the 20/30s republican times from "the mainland."" — Dec 17, 2025 04:45AM
“In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people.
...
But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.”
―
...
But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.”
―
“In Shanghai's prime, no city in the Orient, or the world for that matter, could compare with it. At the peak of its spectacular career the swamp-ridden metropolis surely ranked as the most pleasure-mad, rapacious, corrupt, strife-ridden, licentious, squalid, and decadent city in the world. It was the most pleasure-mad because nowhere else did the population pursue amusement, from feasting to whoring, dancing to powder-taking, with such abandoned zeal. It was rapacious because greed was its driving force; strife-ridden because calamity was always at the door; licentious because it catered to every depravity known to man; squalid because misery stared one brazenly in the face; and decadent because morality, as every Shanghai resident knew, was irrelevant. The missionaries might rail at Shanghai's wickedness and reformers condemn its iniquities, but there was never reason for the city to mend its errant ways, for as a popular Chinese saying aptly observed, "Shanghai is like the emperor's ugly daughter; she never has to worry about finding suitors."
Other great cities - Rome, Athens, or St. Petersburg, for instance – might flatter themselves that they had been conceived for virtuous, even heroic, purposes. Not so the ugly daughter who reveled in her bastard status. Half Oriental, half Occidental: half land, half water; neither a colony nor wholly belonging to China; inhabited by the citizens of every nation in the world but ruled by none, the emperor's ugly daughter was an anomaly among cities. The strange fruit of a forced union between East and West, this mongrel princess came into the world through a grasping premise-the right of one nation to foist a poisonous drug upon another.
Born in greed and humiliation, the ugly daughter grew up in the shadow of the Celestial Empire's defeat by outsiders in the Opium War. Nonetheless, within decades, she had become Asia's greatest metropolis, a brash sprawling juggernaut of a city that dominated the rest of the country with its power, sophistication, and, most of all money.”
― Shanghai : The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949
Other great cities - Rome, Athens, or St. Petersburg, for instance – might flatter themselves that they had been conceived for virtuous, even heroic, purposes. Not so the ugly daughter who reveled in her bastard status. Half Oriental, half Occidental: half land, half water; neither a colony nor wholly belonging to China; inhabited by the citizens of every nation in the world but ruled by none, the emperor's ugly daughter was an anomaly among cities. The strange fruit of a forced union between East and West, this mongrel princess came into the world through a grasping premise-the right of one nation to foist a poisonous drug upon another.
Born in greed and humiliation, the ugly daughter grew up in the shadow of the Celestial Empire's defeat by outsiders in the Opium War. Nonetheless, within decades, she had become Asia's greatest metropolis, a brash sprawling juggernaut of a city that dominated the rest of the country with its power, sophistication, and, most of all money.”
― Shanghai : The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949
“Wasn't that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, 'My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.”
― Dreams of Gods & Monsters
― Dreams of Gods & Monsters
“Probably in all our history no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese. Emotions forgotten since our most savage Indian wars were reawakened.”
―
―
“According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted.
Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians.”
― The Untold History of The United States
Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians.”
― The Untold History of The United States
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