The Man from Beijing Quotes

“The evil always comes from details.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory grayness, the only form of expression available to poverty.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“The truth changes all the time.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“History can never give us exact knowledge of what will happen in the future: rather, it shows us that our ability to prepare ourselves for change is limited.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“There's no reality without battles and no future without fights.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“The truth is never simple. It’s only in the Western world that you think knowledge is something you can acquire quickly and easily. It takes time. The truth never hurries.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“New ideas are always resisted.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“There’s always an end. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Memory is like glass. A person who has died is still visible, very close. But we can no longer contact each other. Death is mute; it excludes conversations, only allows silence.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Big changes don't happen at the battlefield; they are made in closed rooms where very powerful people decide in which direction things should go.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“A life is a constant quest how to achieve the best result.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“There will always be new opposites, class struggles and uprisings. History has no ending.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“If a policeman is serious about his profession but says he has time, he lies.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Wherever battles are waged there are casualties, and death is a common occurrence. But what is closest to our hearts is the best interest of the people and the suffering of the vast majority, and when we die for the people, it is an honorable death. Nevertheless we should do our best to avoid unnecessary casualties.
Mao Zedong, 1944”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“China is a poor country. The economic development everybody talks about has only benefited a limited part of the population. If this way of leading China into the future continues, with a gap between the rich and the poor growing wider all the time, it will end up in catastrophe. China will be thrust back once more into hopeless chaos. Or fascist structures will become dominant. We are defending the hundreds of millions of peasants who, when all’s said and done, are the ones whose labor is producing the wealth on which developments are based. Developments they are benefiting from less and less.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“A journalist who doesn't know how to find a phone number no matter how secret it is should change his profession.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Letters...People do not write the truth; they write the things that, they believe, you would like to read.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“This is what Sweden is - quiet people leaning over the newspapers and coffee cups, each one with his own thoughts and destiny.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Esu surūkęs tiek daug cigarečių, kad suguldžius į liniją jų užtektų nuo Stokholmo centro iki Sioderteljės. Maždaug nuo Butšiurkos cigaretės jau su filtru, bet nuo to ne ką geriau.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“This day in December 2005 was Ya Ru’s thirty-eighth birthday. He agreed with the Western philosopher who had once written that at that age a man was in the middle of his life. He had a lot of friends who, as they approached their forties, felt old age like a faint but cold breeze on the back of their necks. Ya Ru had no such worries; he had made up his mind as a student never to waste time and energy worrying about things he couldn’t do anything about. The passage of time was relentless and capricious, and one would lose the battle with it in the end. The only resistance a man could offer was to make the most of time, exploit it without trying to prevent its progress”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“I was enticed like a fly to a pot of honey by something reminiscent of a religious cult offering salvation. We were not urged to commit collective suicide, because the Day of Judgment was nigh, but to give up our individuality for the benefit of a collective intoxication, at the heart of which was a Little Red Book that had replaced all other forms of enlightenment. It contained all wisdom, the answers to all questions, expressions of all the social and political visions the world needed in order to progress from its present state and install once and for all paradise on earth, rather than a paradise in some remote kingdom in the sky. But what we didn’t even begin to understand was that the sayings comprised living words. They were not inscribed in stone. They described reality. We read the sayings without interpreting them. As if the Little Red Book was a dead catechism, a revolutionary liturgy.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“The whole of China was overshadowed by the injustice of the past.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Ya Ru’s father had drowned in the big political tidal wave that Mao had set in motion.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“The passage of time was relentless and capricious, and one would lose the battle with it in the end. The only resistance a man could offer was to make the most of time, exploit it without trying to prevent its progress.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“The westerly wind whines sharp, wild gees cry in the sky, the frosty morning’s moon.
Frosty the morning’s moon,
Horses’ hooves clatter hard,
Stifled the sound of the trumpet.
Mao Zedong, 1935”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“There is a silence in empty houses that is unique... People have left and taken all the noise with them.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“The cold grips us like handcuffs and the heat is the liberating key.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect.”
― Henning Mankel, The Man from Beijing

“After all, the only thing we have left is friends. You can say that they are the last fortress to be defended.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing