Johan Huizinga Quotes

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

We're going to have to change our traditions, our history.

Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.

Haiti has changed a lot.

We still have a lot of work to do in American culture. More open-mindedness is happening - in some cases rapidly, in some, slowly.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

A cultural shift is not always an ideological one - or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving.

Look - There's good creepy and there's bad creepy. Today's creepy is tomorrow's necessity.

Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

A society based on … reality must reconcile in its life, the categories of permanence and change.

Cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

The technical progress of the last half-century has transformed our country in countless ways. But, fortunately, we have continued to keep our own customs and culture. It is up to us now, more than ever, in shaping our new country, to achieve a consolidation, in which neither the rapid progress of recent years, nor the age-old customs of our forefathers, are lost or diminished, but rather fused into a new national characteristic in which the best is preserved, while the worst may be thrown away.

I think culture is a very challenging thing to reverse.

Even if there have been setbacks during these past years, China is changing. China's society is opening.

How is it possible that in just the last ten years all of these things which were taboo throughout our culture, throughout the culture, things that were taboo are now not only normal but celebrated, and people who were not really supportive of them are called kooks and the new weirdos?

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

Reform is a work of time; a national taste, however wrong it may be, cannot be totally changed at once.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.

The people of Iran have been battling against consecutive conflicts between tradition and modernity for over 100 years... some have tried and are trying to see the world through the eyes of their predecessors and to deal with the problems and difficulties of the existing world by virtue of the values of the ancients... many others...seek to go forth in step with world developments and not lag behind the caravan of civilization, development and progress.