Hendrik Willem van Loon Quotes

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.

High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed

The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

Great art... is the result of the labours of thousands of faithful craftsmen who know that they are doomed to remain for ever outside the gates of the Paradise of Perfection, but who nevertheless will give the very best there is in them because the work they do means more to them than anything else in this world.

Life means progress, and progress means suffering.

An ignorant person is, by the very fact of his or her ignorance, a very dangerous person.

The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human was given its first chance to become truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made 'knowledge and understanding' the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and sensible society of human beings.

....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.

It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness.

A few drops of science will often disinfect an entire barrel full of ignorance and prejudice.

In history as in life it is success that counts. Start a political upheaval and let yourself be caught, and you will hang as a traitor. But place yourself at the head of a rebellion and gain your point, and all future generations will worship you as the Father of their Country.

The world is in dreadful need of men who will assume the new leadership - who will have the courage of their own visions and who will recognise clearly that we are only at the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely new system of seamanship.

In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.