Wealth & Money Quote by Johan Huizinga

Huizinga is smuggling a conservative thesis into a sentence that sounds like a neutral observation: no matter what you claim to want - salvation, knowledge, money - you only get it when the ground beneath you stops shaking. The line works because it collapses lofty aspiration into logistics. Heaven and wealth sit side by side as if they’re equally dependent on the same mundane infrastructure: predictable rules, enforceable norms, a life not constantly interrupted by fear.

Coming from a Dutch historian writing in the shadow of Europe’s unravelling, “security and order” isn’t a bland preference for tidiness; it’s a diagnosis of what modern crisis does to culture. Huizinga watched the early 20th century turn anxiety into a permanent condition: war, mass politics, economic whiplash, ideological militias. In that environment, even “wisdom” becomes hard to pursue because attention narrows to survival, and institutions that store knowledge - universities, archives, courts, churches - become targets or tools.

The subtext is also a warning to idealists who believe virtue can thrive in chaos, or that the right belief system will float above material conditions. Huizinga implies that moral and intellectual life is not self-sustaining; it needs boring, durable frameworks. There’s a sting here for revolutionaries and for complacent elites alike: disorder doesn’t just threaten property, it starves the mind; order isn’t just repression, it’s the precondition for any long game. The sentence’s quiet force is its refusal to romanticize turbulence.