Quotes
Authors
Andrew X. Pham

"Nobody gives way to anybody. Everyone just angles, points, dives directly toward his destination, pretending it is an all-or-nothing gamble. People glare at one another and fight for maneuvering space. All parties are equally determined to get the right-of-way--insist on it. They swerve away at the last possible moment, giving scant inches to spare. The victor goes forwards, no time for a victory grin, already engaging in another contest of will. Saigon traffic is Vietnamese life, a continuous charade of posturing, bluffing, fast moves, tenacity and surrenders."

Source : Andrew X. Pham (2010). “Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam”, p.75, Macmillan

Andrew X. Pham

#Party Quotes #Moving Quotes #Fighting Quotes

“Consequentialist theories pretend that we can set some great big ends (the general happiness, human flourishing), provide ourselves with definite enough conceptions of them to make them the objects of instrumental reasoning, and then obtain enough reliable information about what actions will best promote them that we could regulate our conduct by these considerations alone.”
“Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead.”
“What you learn from others you can use to follow. What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.”
“The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.”
“It's amazing how everything here seems like it's in abundance. In Cuba, there is a shortage of everything.”
“Rough Johnson, the great moralist.”
“All of the services commonly thought to require the State-from the coining of money to police protection to the development of law in defense of the rights of person and property-can be and have been supplied far more efficiently and certainly more morally by private persons. The State is in no sense required by the nature of man; quite the contrary.”
“I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.”

Source : "American Dreamer". www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

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