20 Quotes by William Kirby

The world is ruled by such dreams, dreams of impassioned hearts, and improvisations of warm lips, not by cold words linked in chains of iron sequence, --- not by logic. The heart with its passions, not the understanding with its reasoning, sways, in the long run, the actions of mankind.

A war in the Taiwan Strait would destroy China's international relations overnight. It would destroy Chinese - Japanese relations, not to mention Chinese - American relations.

You could argue that war is always an irrational act, and yet many states enter into military conflict out of rational calculation or national interest or the stability or longevity of their regime.

East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.

So, anything that avoids a conflict that could draw in, unhappily again, outside powers such as the United States or revisit, for example, Japan's interests in the Taiwan area would be the last thing that anyone would want.

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.

The Chinese government since 1979 has been very successful in economic development, and successful enough, simply by surviving, in the realm of political development.

The greater concerns in China and Taiwan are on the political side, not on the economic side.

The reform of state industry, and most directly related to that, the banking sector, is enormously daunting.