Time & Perspective Quote by Lennart Meri

Meri is diagnosing a political and cultural amnesia: a civilization that has forgotten how to feel time as continuity and instead treats it like a commodity to be measured, allocated, and spent. The image does the work. A “bond between times” implies obligation across generations, a sense that the past is not a museum but a living contract. The “yardstick” is colder: linear, bureaucratic, managerial. Time becomes quantifiable distance, chopped into units that can be optimized, audited, and traded off, rather than inhabited.

As a statesman from a small nation repeatedly squeezed by empires, Meri isn’t waxing poetic for its own sake. Estonia’s 20th century made the stakes of historical memory brutally concrete: occupation, deportation, enforced rewriting of the national story. In that context, losing the bond between times isn’t just a philosophical loss; it’s a vulnerability. People who experience history only “bit by bit” are easier to govern through short horizons, easier to sell on quick fixes, easier to detach from responsibility to ancestors and descendants.

The subtext is also a critique of modern progress-talk. Measuring “from one point to another” flatters the idea that we’re always moving forward, but it drains time of moral texture. Meri’s line pushes back against the present-tense tyranny of modern life and politics, where quarterly results, news cycles, and electoral calendars shrink what counts as real. He’s arguing, with quiet severity, that civilization isn’t just technology and growth; it’s the ability to remember, to anticipate, and to act as if those other times can still hold us accountable.