Daily Inspiration Quote by Hu Shih

Hu Shih’s provocation cuts against the soothing fantasy that truth is a finished monument waiting to be visited. He flips the usual moral order: intellectual responsibility doesn’t grow from certainty, but from the loss of it. If there is no “eternal, unchanging truth,” then thinking stops being a ritual of obedience and becomes a craft with stakes. You don’t get to inherit answers; you have to earn provisional ones, test them, revise them, and own the consequences.

The subtext is a rebuke to both scholastic traditionalism and ideological absolutism, twin temptations in early 20th-century China. Hu, a leading voice in the New Culture Movement, was arguing for a modern public mind: empirical, self-correcting, allergic to metaphysical grandstanding. His pragmatic streak (shaped by exposure to John Dewey) shows in the way the sentence makes “truth” less a sacred noun than a working hypothesis. The point isn’t that nothing is true; it’s that treating truth as absolute is a convenient way to dodge accountability. Absolutism lets you outsource judgment to ancestors, scriptures, parties, or systems.

Rhetorically, the line works because it makes responsibility inseparable from uncertainty. “Only when” is a dare: abandon the comfort of permanence, and you gain a harder virtue. It’s also a cultural strategy. By denying an unchanging Truth, Hu clears space for reform in language, education, and politics without declaring war on meaning itself. The quote reads like a manifesto for intellectual adulthood: no cosmic guarantees, just disciplined inquiry and the ethics of being corrigible.