Arnold J. Toynbee

"Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything. For some religions, history provides evidence of the working out of a divine purpose. For the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, it demonstrated the manifestation of the infinite spirit (Geist) on earth. Karl Marx built on Hegel to produce his “scientific” history, which purported to show that history was moving inexorably toward its destined end of full Communism. Johann Gottfried von Herder, the influential German thinker of the late eighteenth century, history showed that an organic German nation had existed for centuries, although in political terms it had not yet reached its full potential. For imperialists like Sir Charles Dilke, the study of the past confirmed the superiority of the British race. Arnold Toynbee, whose work is largely neglected now, saw a pattern of challenge and response as civilizations grew great in overcoming obstacles and then failed as they turned soft and lazy. The Chinese, unlike most Western thinkers, did not see history as a linear process at all. Their scholars talked in terms of a dynastic cycle where dynasties came and went in an unending repetition, following the unchanging pattern of birth, maturity, and death, all under the aegis of heaven."

"Man’s true end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever."

"As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorat-ing elements. Only birth can conquer death-the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new."

"When God made Baluchistan, he laughed."

"Our western science is a child of moral virtues; and it must now become the father of further moral virtues if its extraordinary material triumphs in our time are not to bring human history to an abrupt, unpleasant and discreditable end."

"I don’t believe a committee can write a book. ... It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps. But I don’t believe it can write a book."

"[T]he equation of religion with belief is rather recent."

"India is the central link in a chain of regional civilizations that extends from Japan in the far north-east to Ireland in the far northwest. Between these two extremities the chain sags down southwards in a festoon that dips below the Equator in Indonesia."

"The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves."

"We have been Godlike in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbitlike in our unplanned breeding of ourselves."

"[E]very oasis is an island that has water inside it but not round it."

"A city that outdistances Man's walking powers is a trap for Man. It threatens to become a prison from which he cannot escape unless he has mechanical means of transport, the thoroughfares for carrying these, and the purchasing power for commanding the use of artificial means of communication."

"When I was a child, the institution of war, which, by then, had been in existence for perhaps about five thousand years, was still being taken for granted by most people in the World as a normal and acceptable fact of life. One small religious community, the Society of Friends, was at that time singular in condemning war as immoral and in consequently refusing to have any part or lot in war-making."

"We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education."

"Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self."

"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."

"If we are frank with ourselves, we shall admit that we are engaged on a deliberate and sustained and concentrated effort to impose limitations upon the sovereignty and independence of the fifty or sixty local sovereign independent States which at present partition the habitable surface of the earth and divide the political allegiance of mankind.It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep on protesting our loyalty to it so loudly. The harder we press our attack upon the idol, the more pains we take to keep its priests and devotees in a fool’s paradise—lapped in a false sense of security which will inhibit them from taking up arms in their idol’s defense. The local national state, invested with the attributes of sovereignty — is an abomination of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. It has stood in that place now — demanding and receiving human sacrifices from its poor deluded votaries — for four or five centuries. Our political task in our generation is to cast the abomination out, to cleanse the temple and to restore the worship of the divinity to whom the temple rightfully belongs. In plain terms, we have to re-transfer the prestige and the prerogatives of sovereignty from the fifty or sixty fragments of contemporary society to the whole of contemporary society — from the local national states by which sovereignty has been usurped, with disastrous consequences, for half a millennium, to some institution embodying our society as a whole.In the world as it is today, this institution can hardly be a universal Church. It is more likely to be something like a League of Nations. I will not prophesy. I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands..."

"Societies, not states, are 'the social atoms' with which students of history have to deal."

"No collection of facts is ever complete, because the Universe is without bounds. And no synthesis or interpretation is ever final, because there are always fresh facts to be found after the first collection has been provisionally arranged."

"Compared with the life-span of a human being the time-span of a civilization is so vast that a human observer cannot hope to take the measure of its curve unless he is in a position to view it in a distant perspective; and he can only obtain this perspective vis-a-vis some society that is extinct. He can never stand back sufficiently far from the history of the society in which he himself lives and moves and has his being. In other words, to assert of any living society, at any moment in its life, that it is the consummation of human history is to hazard a guess which is intrinsically unsusceptible of immediate verification. When we find that a majority of the members of all societies at all times make this assertion about their own civilizations, it becomes evident that their guesses have really nothing to do with any objective calculation of probabilities but are pure expressions of the egocentric illusion."

"The Hellenization of Rome was, of course, the most important cultural conquest that the Hellenes ever achieved at any stage of their history."

"No being can be what he is unless he is putting his essence into action in his field."

"On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole."

"It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it."

"The difference between a Humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree."

"A life which does not go into action is a failure."

"The value of the goal lies in the goal itself; and therefore the goal cannot be attained unless it is pursued for its own sake."

"[S]o-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question."

"The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality."

"There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics."

"[T]he dogma that History is just "one damned thing after another...""

"History [is] a vision of God's creation on the move."

"Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case, in extremis or post mortem, we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two. To date, these two plagues have been deadly enough, in partnership, to kill off nineteen out of twenty representatives of this recently evolved species of human society; but, up to now, the deadliness of these scourges has had a saving limit."

"As human beings, we are endowed with this freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us."

"Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour. No known civilization has, ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance."

"Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet."

"Now who are the individuals who are the greatest benefactors of the living generation of mankind? I should say: Confucius and Lao-Tse; the Buddha; the Prophets of Israel and Judah; Zoroaster, Jesus, Muhammad; and Socrates."

"The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue."

"These immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land again. What do these great, sleek, well-fed creatures live on so sumptuously?"

"Man is a born geometer. Even when he is expressing himself in curves, as he has done in the undulating roofs of Eastern Asia and in the flowing sculptures at Borobudur, his lines follow mathematical laws that are unknown to Nature; and he is frankly defying her when he works in rectangles. Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to light... The Buddhist stupa at Borobudur in Central Java is a lyric poem in stone, flowing round the crown of a hill to the musical accompaniment of a jagged mountain range on one side and a green expanse of rice fields on the other. Angkor is not orchestral; it is monumental. It is an epic poem which makes its effect, like the Odyssey and like Paradise Lost, by the grandeur of its structure as well as by the beauty of the details. Angkor is an epic in rectangular forms imposed upon the Cambodian jungle."

"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play."

"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."

"America is like a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair!"

"Religion holds the solution to all problems of human relationship, whether they are between parents and children or nation and nation. Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God. When threats force him to look at the limitations of his human power, he’s often ready to seek his spiritual one. What we need is patience and awe of God’s plan in human history!"

"I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills."

"[I] cannot think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil."

"Of the twenty-two civilizations that appear in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. All nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith From spiritual faith to great courage From courage to liberty From liberty to abundance From abundance to selfishness From selfishness to complacency From complacency to apathy From apathy to dependency From dependency back again into bondage."

"I guess that both the West and the world are getting to turn away from man — worshipping ideologies — Communism and secular individualism alike — and become converted to an Oriental religion corning neither from Russia nor from the West. I guess that this will be the Christian religion that came to the Greeks and the Romans from Palestine, with one or two elements in traditional Christianity discarded and replaced by a new element from India, I expect and hope that this avatar of Christianity will include the vision of God as being Love. But I also expect and hope that it will discard the other traditional Christian vision of God as being a jealous god, and that it will reject the self-glorification of this jealous god's "chosen people" as being unique. This is where India comes in, with her belief that there may be more than one illuminating and saving approach to the mystery of the universe."

"The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century."

"At the close of this century, the world would be dominated by the West, but that in the 21st century "India will conquer her conquerors.""