Johan Huizinga

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.

The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.

Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.

Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.