“In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know.”

“Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. ”

“So why is Chinese social networking booming despite the censorship? Part of the reason is the Chinese language. Posts on Twitter and Twitter clones such as Weibo are limited to 140 characters. In English that comes to about 20 words or a sentence with a short link - in effect, a headline. But in Chinese you can write a whole paragraph or tell a whole story in 140 characters. One Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. In some ways, Weibo (which means "microblog" in Chinese) is more like Facebook than Twitter. As far as the Chinese are concerned, if something is not on Weibo, it does not exist.”

“BRUCE STERLING Homo sapiens declared extinct, Nature, November 11, 1999:Since I've been asked to offer an epitaph," the highly distributed poetware continued, "I believe that we should rearrange the Great Wall of China to spell out (in Chinese of course, since most of them were always Chinese) -- 'THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS, BUT NOT AT ALL FAR-SIGHTED.”

“The Pope replied, “of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves.” He spoke of how Saint Peter himself, the rock on which Christ had built his church, had told Christ to leave him, “for I am a sinful man.” Peter was a sinful man. We all are, including popes. We are imperfect and “our hearts are anxious.” But we cannot and should not let the fact of our unworthiness and flaws and failures build that wall with a kind of inverted pride that says, Oh, I’m so unworthy, and I’d know how unworthy I am better than you would.”

“There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.”