Time & Perspective Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

“Perhaps” is doing sly, surgical work here. Lichtenberg isn’t thundering a prophecy; he’s slipping a scalpel between the ribs of his own Enlightenment era and twisting. The phrase “so-called Dark Ages” already signals suspicion toward inherited labels: history’s habit of flattering the present by degrading the past. By calling the term itself into question, he exposes it as a rhetorical convenience, not a neutral description.

Then comes the real sting: “including our own.” That’s the Enlightenment’s nightmare in miniature. An age that congratulates itself on reason, science, and progress is suddenly forced to imagine how it might look from the outside-from some later vantage point that’s unimpressed by its self-mythology. The line turns historical periodization into a weapon: if “dark” is just what the winners call what came before, today’s certainties can be tomorrow’s superstition.

As a scientist and aphorist, Lichtenberg knew that knowledge advances by correcting errors, not by declaring victory over ignorance. The subtext is epistemic humility, but with bite: we are not immune to intellectual fashion, institutional blindness, or moral compromise. “In time” is the quiet threat-judgment won’t come from our contemporaries, who share our assumptions, but from descendants who inherit the consequences.

It works because it reverses the usual arrow of condescension. Instead of modernity patronizing the medieval, the future patronizes us, and suddenly our era’s “light” feels less like illumination than glare.