Quotes from Johan Huizinga

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.

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

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

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

Culture means control over nature.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

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

One does not realize the historical sensation as a re-experiencing, but as an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather of the world by means of music.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.

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.

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.

Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

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

Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.

But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused and, fora moment lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells.

No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.

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

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

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

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.