“The first thing that will strike you as odd in Japan is how polite everyone is. Quite apart from the neverending bowing, they have obsequiousness down to an art that even the Chinese haven't mastered.”
Source: Clarkson on Cars (1996), p. 58
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Jeremy Clarkson 60
English broadcaster, journalist and writer 1960Related quotes

Said to reporters during a state visit to the People's Republic of China (November 4, 1996). http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/spelare/createRam.asp?namn=/p3/nyhetsverktyg/0328persson_kina_2003-03-31_140354.rm

Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. New York: Random House, 2002, 135–136.
Also quoted by Richard Dawkins in his Eulogy for Douglas Adams (17 September 2001) http://www.edge.org/documents/adams_index.html
Context: If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

"Chinese People Will not Tolerate Aggression" (October 1950)
On her travels in China in “Madeleine Thien: ‘In China, you learn a lot from what people don’t tell you’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/08/madeleine-thien-interview-do-not-say-we-have-nothing in The Guardian (2016 Oct 8)

Entre Paréntesis (2004) edited by Ignacio Echevarría, p. 223

“Even strength has to bow down to wisdom sometimes.”
Variant: Even strength must bow to wisdom sometimes.
Source: The Lightning Thief

1930s, Fireside Chat in the night before signing the Fair Labor Standards (1938)
Context: In nine cases out of ten the speaker or writer who, seeking to influence public opinion, descends from calm argument to unfair blows hurts himself more than his opponent.
The Chinese have a story on this — a story based on three or four thousand years of civilization: Two Chinese coolies were arguing heatedly in the midst of a crowd. A stranger expressed surprise that no blows were being struck. His Chinese friend replied: "The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out."
Source: Notes of Thought (1883), p. 91