The current prevalent fears of growing Chinese ownership are a pure fantasy

In particular, it is important to stress that the current prevalent fears of growing Chinese ownership are a pure fantasy. The wealthy countries are in fact much wealthier than they sometimes think. The total real estate and financial assets net of debt owned by European households today amount to some 70 trillion euros. By comparison the total assets of the various Chinese sovereign wealth funds plus the reserves of the Bank of China represent around 3 million euros, or less then one-twentieth of the former amount.

T. Piketty, Capital in the 21st century (2013), 463

The magnitude of the changes initiated by the French Revolution should not be overstated

The magnitude of the changes initiated by the French Revolution should not be overstated, however. Beyond the probable decrease of inequality of wealth between 1780 and 1810, followed by a gradual increase between 1810 and 1910, and especially after 1870 , the most significant fact is that inequality of capital ownership remained relatively stable at an extremely high level throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this period [in France] the top decile consistently owned 80 to 90 percent of the total wealth.

T. Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (2013), 342

The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm

In fact, neither the economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914-11945 regardless of what policies they adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration). The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all the wealthy countries more or less equalized... Broadly speaking the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this simple reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it.

T. Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (2013), 98-99

It’s a problem of identity. Many of my American friends feel they don’t have enough of it.

It’s a problem of identity. Many of my American friends feel they don’t have enough of it. They often feel worthless, or they don’t know how they feel. Identity is the number-one national problem here. There seems to be a shortage of it in the land, a dearth of selfhood amidst other plenty—maybe because there are so many individual egos trying to outdo each other and enlarge themselves.

...

A culture talks most about what most bothers it: the Poles talk compulsively about the Russians and the most minute shifts of political strategy. Americans worry about who they are.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 262 & 264

You’ve seen people live perfectly happily within their less than perfect unions

Wouldn’t your unhappiness be just the same as here? No, it wouldn’t. It would exist within the claustrophobia of no choice, rather than the agoraphobia of open options. It would have different dimensions, different weight. But surely an incompatible marriage is unacceptable. An American notion. A universal notion. Women in Bengal rebel against bad marriages, for God’s sake. Women in Bengal don’t rebel against emotional incompatibility. They wouldn’t understand what you mean. But I’m not in Bengal! If you were in Poland, you’d be making a sensible accommodation to your situation. You’ve seen people live perfectly happily within their less than perfect unions.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 230

There is still room in hell for you; we don't want our heaven crammed

We are the sweet selected few
All others may be damned
There is still room in hell for you
We don't want our heaven crammed

Baptist hymn, unknown. Quoted in A. Bloom, 'Ecumenism' [1973], Sobornost 37:1 (2005), 14

The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own forgotten history is an antidote to shallowness

In our highly ideological times, even nostalgia has its politics. The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own forgotten history is an antidote to shallowness. The ideologues of the future see attachment to the past as that most awful of all monsters, the agent of reaction. It is to be extracted from the human soul with no quarter or self-pity, for it obstructs the inevitable march of events into the next Utopia. Only certain Eastern European writers, forced to march into the future too often, know the regressive dangers of both forgetfulness and clinging to the past. But then, they are among our world’s experts of mourning, having lost not an archaeological but a living history.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 115