No longer surprising to

Author: Xu Huaiqian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-02-01
Features: For a long time, I have been puzzled, why some intellectuals, despite reading thousands of books, remain shallow, crude, foolish, and even less kind than illiterates? Why during the "Cultural Revolution," many intellectuals fought with each other more treacherously and cruelly than the "working people"? This is not only because they read too many bad books and absorbed too much negative nutrition from the books, but also a very important factor is that these people never developed their own thoughts from good books. —From "Reading is Only Fun When You Have Something to Say"
Sentimentality is relative to common sense. When a person reaches the point where they can't distinguish between sentimentality and common sense, mistakenly taking sentimentality as common sense, that person is utterly deluded. No one would have thought that in his later years, Qi Huan Gong, one of the "Five Hegemons" who once "unified the states and rectified the world," was deluded to such a degree. He favored Yi Ya, Zhi Dao, and Kai Fang, wanting to appoint one of them as prime minister after Guan Zhong's death.