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.

And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.

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.

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

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.

India Conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.

The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.

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.

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

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

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

Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.

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.

It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood.

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.

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.

Historically, there had been many periods of Chinese Renaissance.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Music is the soul of language.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job.

Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.

I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

Two races share today the soil of Canada. These people had not always been friends. But I hasten to say it. There is no longer any family here but the human family. It matters not the language people speak, or the altars at which they kneel.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'