Wit & Attitude Quote by Mika Waltari

Waltari’s line is a cold splash of water on one of modernity’s favorite narcotics: the belief that time itself is a moral escalator. He doesn’t attack hope because he’s allergic to optimism; he attacks it because, in his view, hope is often a dodge. “So foolish is the heart of man” shifts the indictment from intellect to appetite. We don’t misread history because we lack data; we misread it because we want permission to keep desiring the same things, making the same bargains, and calling it progress.

The sentence is built like a trap. It starts with the intimate (“the heart of man”), then widens into a diagnosis of historical amnesia: “learning nothing from his past errors.” That’s not a casual complaint about forgetfulness; it’s a portrait of a species that treats mistakes as isolated accidents rather than patterns. The final clause, “fancying that tomorrow must be better than today,” is the sharpest twist. “Must” turns optimism into entitlement, and “fancying” makes that entitlement childish, almost decorative. Hope becomes a costume we put on to avoid looking directly at consequences.

Context matters: Waltari wrote in a century that repeatedly promised “never again” and then produced fresh variations on catastrophe. Coming from a Finnish novelist shaped by Europe’s convulsions, the line reads less like private cynicism and more like a warning about the political uses of wishful thinking. If you assume tomorrow is guaranteed to improve, you stop demanding the hard, unglamorous work that improvement actually requires.