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

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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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An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
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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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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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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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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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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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Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.
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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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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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The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
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