Time & Perspective Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein’s sentence lands like a double-take that refuses to resolve. “Extraordinary” appears twice, first as astonishment, then as a grim confirmation. That repetition is the trick: she performs disbelief while denying herself the comfort of staying in it. The line reads like a mind catching itself romanticizing catastrophe, then snapping back to report what it sees. It’s not a lyrical lament about “human nature”; it’s an observation about how modern life can evacuate the very idea of forward motion.

The bluntness of “whole populations” matters. Stein isn’t talking about individual despair but a social condition, something structural enough to spread. “Projects for the future” is also a carefully chosen phrase: not dreams, not hopes, not ideology, but projects - organized, practical commitments that assume tomorrow is a place you can build toward. When those vanish, you’re left with survival, ritual, repetition, distraction: existence without a narrative.

Context sharpens the edge. Stein lived through industrial modernity’s shocks, World War I, the rise of mass politics, and the interwar sense that history had stopped being progressive and started being cyclical and violent. Her modernist sensibility - suspicious of inherited stories, attentive to the ways language exposes thought’s glitches - makes the line feel diagnostic rather than moralizing. She’s pointing to a population-level numbness: when institutions collapse, when the future becomes a threat instead of a promise, people don’t just lose optimism; they lose the habit of planning. The quote works because it captures that horror in real time: amazement turning into recognition, with no exit ramp.