Hu Shih Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

“But I wish to point out that it is entirely wrong to say that the Chinese are not religious.”

“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 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.”

“In such diffused changes of culture two factors are necessary: contact and understanding.”

“Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.”

“Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.”

“Life and human society are the chief concern of Confucianism and, through it, the chief concern of the Chinese people.”

“It is true that the Chinese are not so religious as the Hindus, or even as the Japanese; and they are certainly not so religious as the Christian missionaries desire them to be.”