“Has anyone ever seen any Japanese begging? It's a race that has self-respect.”

On Serbian war aims and human rights abuses during the post-Yugoslavian conlicts, and especially the Bosnian War, as quoted in (10 June 1993)
Context: It is unfortunate for all that no moral issue has ever been clearer. Any attempt to plea-bargain with outlaws and renegades will only be at the expense of honor, decency and self-respect. The Serbs, are two-dimensional people with a craving for simplicity and an ideology so basic it can be understood without effort. They need enemies, not friends, to focus their two-dimensional ideas. Life for them is a simple tune, never an orchestration, or even a pleasant harmony. Animals make use of their resources with far greater felicity than these retorted creatures, whose subscription to the human race is well in arrears.

Cole has no power to find against ministers: Rudd, 10 April 2006, 13 February 2008, Lateline, ABC TV http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1613142.htm,
Regarding then deputy prime minister Mark Vaile's evidence at the Cole Inquiry, following the Australian Wheat Board's 'oil for food' scandal.
2006

Quoted in Rilke's Letters on Cézanne, foreword (1952, trans. 1985)

What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)
Context: Now, whether there is feeling or not depends upon what your environment or your association is or whatever you may have in common with the player. If you feel empathy for his personal outlook, you naturally feel him musically more than some other environmental and musical opposite who is, in a way. beyond you.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around. But there is no need to compare composers. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, that's okay. They were all pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one's mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I'm getting at is that I know I'm a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived.

Source: The Money Game (1968), Chapter 6, What Are They In It For?, p. 68

"On Self-Respect", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

from The Japanophile's Handbook.

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 32, p. 116