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

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
Essential
Preserves
Essentials
Sudden
Ideals
Lasting
Concepts
Ideal
Revolution
Concept
Thought
Originals
Always
Original
Aquariums
Content
Betterment

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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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People accept a representation in which the elements of wish and fantasy are purposely included but which nevertheless proclaims to represent the past and to serve as a guide-rule for life, thereby hopelessly confusing the spheres of knowledge and will.
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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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Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.
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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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All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.
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Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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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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A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
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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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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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Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
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A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.
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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.
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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
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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.
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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.
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Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.
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