Israel Epstein

"My basic ideas have not changed. I see no reason to change them."

"Already before my teens, amidst the country's surrounding internecine wars and famines, I saw gaunt, ragged refugees flooding into Tianjin. Some begging tearfully for food, some offering to sell their children ... On a forever unforgotten winter morning, ... I came upon a boy of twelve or so, ... crouching stiff and dead in a doorway where he had tried vainly to seek shelter from the freezing night wind."

"There are ... almost certainly more really active people. And these people are amply sure that they are China, China's future. Not that they say it. But it is apparent in every confident word and action, and smile. I became ever more convinced then that Yan'an was the shape of things to come in China, and the next decade would prove it."

"I see a completely different China which is totally different from the China under the rule of Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek. This China is full of hope and free from starvation and defeatist sentiment."

"Looking back, and forward, many Hans and Tibetans today do not measure their relations by just when, in what ancient dynasty, their unity began or was formalized. Rather, they see as the common meaning of their overall and particular histories, all China's nationalities contributing, from the earliest times to the formation and stability of the historically formed multinational entity."

"Different indeed from any colonial or semi-colonial path is the road of Tibet within socialist China. As we have seen from facts and figures, Tibet is massively assisted and in no way exploited by the majority nationality. Economic errors were made, involving waste of labor and funds, which was true in other areas of China as well, but nothing was taken away from the Region and its people for the material benefit of anywhere else."

"After we joined other work groups in transplanting rice, harvesting wheat, afforesting bare hills or digging a canal. All this made us, as nothing else could, forever a part of this land, shaped, tilled, and watered by the soil of so many generations, and now in a state of active rebirth. Whenever we saw new watercourses, roads, or tree-belts, we felt that we,too, had helped create them. Such a feeling is hard to describe by any who have not worked truly mutually, not formonetary wealth, but for a common aim."

"We are indeed living through tremendous days, weeks and months that do indeed “shake the world” ― rejuvenating, revivifying, scraping all the barnacles off the mind and scraping off those who have themselves become barnacles on the cause."

"The absence of greed; faith in an ever-better future; the spirit of service to the people; the prevalence of mutual aid, rarity of theft, and readiness of all ranks of society, and particularly of the youth, to volunteer despite fatigue and peril."