Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

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

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

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 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.

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...

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.

Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.

It is now plain that in tracing the life of our Western Society backwards behind 775 we begin to find it presented to us in terms of something other than itself-in terms of the Roman Empire and of the society to which that Empire belonged. It can also be shown that any elements which we can trace back from Western history into the history of that earlier society may have quite different functions in these two different associations.

The Sinic [Chinese] Civilization originated in the Yellow River Valley. The nature of the challenge which started it is unknown but it is clear that the conditions were severe rather than easy.

The Mayan Civilization originated from the challenge of a tropical fores; the Andean from that of a bleak plateau....

The Indic Civilization in Ceylon flourished in the rainless half of the island.....
New England, whose European colonists have played a predominant part in the history of North America, is one of the bleakest and most barren parts of the continent....

The natives of Nyasaland, where life is easy, remained primitive savages down to the advent of invaders from a distant and inclement Europe.

We might pursue the subject farther, but we have, perhaps, said enough to convince the reader that neither race nor environment, taken by itself, can be the positive factor which, within the last six thousand years, has shaken humanity out of its static repose on the level of primitive society and started it on the hazardous quest of civilization. In any case, neither race nor environment, as hitherto envisaged, has offered, or apparently can offer, any clue as to why this great transition in human history occurred not only in particular places but at particular dates.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

...These intellectuals despise the general public for being non-professional and ignorant;
the public ignores the intellectuals , because it finds them unintelligible and unpractical. This mutual alienation is bad for the two of them and bad for society

All the great religions and philosophies declare that the proper goal for every living creature is to subdue and extinguish its natural self-centerness -to die unto itself.
They also declare unanimously that this effort is difficult because it is contrary to nature ,but that it is at the same time ,the only true way of self- fulfillment and therefore ,the only true way of attaining self-satisfaction and happiness

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 sunsets and sunrises of civilization are inevitably separated by intervals of isolated darkness. The night that followed the Roman sunset was long and uncertain, and the turmoil it brought consumed countless man. But mankind itself did not yield. With its gaze fixed on a distant future, it persevered. Until the first rays of a new dawn at long last penetrated the horizon.

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