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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.

Johan Huizinga

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Johan Huizinga
Age: 72 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 1
Died: 1945
Died: January 1
Cultural Historian
Historian
Linguist
Philosopher
Resistance Fighter
University Teacher
J. Huizinga
Huizinga
Culture
Defined
Human
Older
Humans
Animals
Play
However
Always
Playing
Men
Animal
Inadequately
Teach
Presupposes
Society
Waited

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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
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Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
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We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, intothis susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.
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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.
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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
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History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
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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.
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William James once said: Progress is a terrible thing. It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?
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The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
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A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
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Nelson's famous signal before the Battle of Trafalgar was not: England expects that every man will be a hero. It said: Englandexpects that every man will do his duty. In 1805 that was enough. It should still be.
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What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
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It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.
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Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.
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