[About Hong Kong:] No other place has quite the same blend of East and West, ancient and modern, spectacular and humdrum. - Chris Patten

You know perfectly well there have been attacks on the rule of law, on the independence of the judiciary; abductions around Hong Kong streets; suggestions that Hong Kong’s autonomy needs to be curtailed in the future; suggestions that the autonomy of Hong Kong’s tremendous universities is something that has to be looked at again; there is a sense that free speech is under threat.

[M]y anxiety is not that this community's autonomy would be usurped by Peking, but that it could be given away bit by bit by some people in Hong Kong.

As governor, I experienced the vitality of life in a booming and free Asian city, saw routinely the best and worst aspects of human nature, and was made to revisit some of the principles in which I have always believed but to which I had rarely given much thought previously. In the darker hours of occasionally fretful nights I found myself face to face with the moral dimensions of political action to a greater extent than ever before.