Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

A society, we may say, is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems which each member has to solve for itself as best it may. The presentation of each problem is a challenge to undergo an ordeal, and through this series of ordeals the members of the society progressively differentiate themselves from one another.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

… the dogma that History is just "one damned thing after another...."

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.

Broadly speaking, however, Christianity is a universal church originating in a germ that was alien to the society in which it played its part, while Islam originated in a germ that was indigenous.

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

We may express the historical function of the 'Abbasid Caliphate by describing it as a reintegration and resumption of the Achaemenian Empire - a reintegration of a political structure which had been broken up by the impact of an external force and the resumption of a phase of social life which had been interrupted by an alien intrusion.

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.

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

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.

Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.

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.

While the economic and political maps of the World have now been 'Westernized' almost out of recognition, the cultural map remains today substantially what it was before our Western Society ever started on its career of economic and political conquest. On this cultural plane, for those who have eyes to see, the lineaments of the four living non-Western civilizations are still clear. Even the fainter outlines of the frail primitive societies that are being ground to powder by the passage of the ponderous Western steam-roller have not quite ceased to be visible.

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.

On the political plane for example, the illusion, projected as 'patriotism', is still 'the last infirmity of noble minds' as well as 'the last refuge of a scoundrel'. In the Western World of our day, almost every Englishman, Frenchman, Czechoslovak, and Lithuanian is influenced in his political feelings, thoughts, and actions, by the irrational assumption that his own national state is a more precious institution than his neighbour's.