“Country is based on folk music, which has been around for centuries—” “So has the plague.”

“My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.”

“For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority.”

“The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.”

“Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is ... Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society. The result has been centuries of chaos.”

“It has been proved that the land can exist without the country - and be better for it; it has not been proved that the country can live without the land.”