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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?

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
Littles
James
May
Bridges
Crevice
Little
Highly
Collapsed
Thing
Notion
Ambiguous
Way
Terrible
William
Progress
Split
Also
Splits
Earth
Bridge

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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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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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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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You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
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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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Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
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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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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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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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Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
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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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Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
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Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
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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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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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The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses.
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