Evan Osnos Quotes

Author Image

Evan Osnos

Profession : Journalist

Birth : December 24, 1976

There's a deep underlying unpredictability to life that is thrilling. In China, my wife would say you go out to buy toilet paper, and you come back, and something interesting or revealing or funny happened on the way.

Evan Osnos

Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism.

Evan Osnos

Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.

Evan Osnos

Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.

Evan Osnos

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

Evan Osnos

'419 scams,' named for a clause from the Nigerian penal code, are such a part of the white noise of the digital age that we no longer notice them.

Evan Osnos

I didn't expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they've sanded away all but the outcroppings of history - the museums, the memorials.

Evan Osnos

By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core.

Evan Osnos

Although Shanghai is on the sea, it long lacked the prosperity that Hong Kong enjoyed, so while Hong Kong became known for its exotic ocean creatures, Shanghai built its diet around more commonplace river and sea fish.

Evan Osnos

The Central Propaganda Department is the highest-ranking censorship agency in China. And it has control over everything from the appointment of newspaper editors to university professors to the way that films are cut and distributed.

Evan Osnos

Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.

Evan Osnos

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

Evan Osnos

By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's.

Evan Osnos

Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.

Evan Osnos

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

Evan Osnos

I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.

Evan Osnos

There's a tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible.

Evan Osnos

There's a reason the Chinese government is very concerned about Ai Weiwei. It's because he has all of these ingredients in his life that allow him to attract enormous attention across a very broad spectrum of the population.

Evan Osnos

On some level, there's a limit to what the government really worries about when it comes to a guy like Ai Weiwei, who's talking to a limited audience of people. He's talking to people who more or less already agree with him.

Evan Osnos

Usually when you interview somebody for a number of hours, they'll say something that is self-aggrandizing or is a manipulation of the facts.

Evan Osnos