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"In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language."
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"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies."

"Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling."

"Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?"

"We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.I have no native tongue."

"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."

"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."

"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."

"I want to hear you wound my lovely language with your rough barbarian tongue."
Explore more quotes by Hu Shih

"What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another; and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty."

"For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples."

"The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture."

"Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic."

"Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility."

"After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country."

"No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India."

"On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people."

"The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance."

"And lastly, the political revolutions from 1911 to the present time have done more to bring about tremendous social changes everywhere than even the economic and industrial changes and the new schools."
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