Words matter. These are the best Johan Huizinga Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
You only live a short time… and you are dead a long time.
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.
Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
Culture means control over nature.
If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.
An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.
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.
Life is made too easy. Mankind’s moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.
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.
