Johan Huizinga's Quotes

We can't put up a protectionist dam on our own against the neo-liberal world market either. However, we can try, together with our European partners, to maintain the social character of Europe as much as possible.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.

An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.

You only live a short time... and you are dead a long time.

The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.

These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.

The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.

Culture means control over nature.

Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?

History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.

It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.

The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.

Whether the aim is in heaven or on earth, wisdom or wealth, the essential condition of its pursuit and attainment is always security and order.

A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.

From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.