Liang Ch‘i-ch‘ao

“ I reply that liberty connotes equal rights for all; it is an important factor in human life, and there is no direction in which it will fail to serve such a purpose. At the same time it should be noted that a distinction must be made between real liberty, false liberty, complete liberty, partial liberty, the liberty of civilization, and the liberty of savages. ”

“ The gentry, bullies of the countryside, gobble up their poorer neighbours like fish, and there are no means of resisting them; traders abscond, leaving their debts unpaid, and those who have been swindled have no means of redress. Now, it is open to all men to become gentry or traders; it follows, therefore, that the liberty of the community is also a point of importance. Is not this so? In the highest classes there are men and women who make a perfect cesspool of official life;―is this liberty? In the towns there are young and old who look on opium as a necessary food;―is this liberty? ”

“ But my country, the Middle State, the Flowery Land, stands proudly alone, having survived, in one unbroken line, ever increasing in size and brilliancy, down to the present day. And in the future it will spread into a myriad branches, to be fused together in one furnace. Ah, beautiful is my country! ”

“ She transmutes the substance and etherializes its use, thus producing a new factor of civilization which is altogether her own. Her blue is thus bluer than the original indigo-blue of foreigners; her ice is colder than their water. ”

“ China is a huge country with a learning of its own, which has been handed down for several thousand years and which is so well fortified by defences that foreign ideas do not easily find their way in. ”

“ The object of the first was to protect the people against their own government; of the second, to protect members of a church against the church; of the third, to protect one's own nation against foreign nations ”

“ However, a careful estimate of their capacity shows that they are really nothing more than mere imitators; they are in no sense able to add anything of their own or anything they may have themselves initiated. ”