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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.

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
Mind
Passes
Thinking
Attraction
Profound
Principles
Conveniently
Faith
Adolescent
Away
Troublesome
Doe
Seemingly
Reason
Realism

More quotes by Johan Huizinga

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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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Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
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A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
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We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.
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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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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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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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Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
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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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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
Johan Huizinga
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Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.
Johan Huizinga
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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
Johan Huizinga
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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.
Johan Huizinga
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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.
Johan Huizinga
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The art of watching has become mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree.
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You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
Johan Huizinga
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The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
Johan Huizinga
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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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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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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
Johan Huizinga