Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

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.

Aurangzeb's purpose in building those three mosques was the same intentionally offensive political purpose that moved the Russians to build their Orthodox cathedral in the city-centre at Warsaw. Those mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism's holiest of holy places. I must say that Aurangzeb had a veritable genius for picking out provocative sites. Aurangzeb and Philip II of Spain are a pair. They are incarnations of the gloomily fanatical vein in the Christian - Muslim - Jewish family of religions. Aurangzeb - poor wretched misguided bad man - spent a lifetime of hard labour in raising massive monuments to his own discredit. Perhaps the Poles were really kinder in destroying the Russians' self-discrediting monument in Warsaw than you have been in sparing Aurangzeb's mosques.

The difference between a humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree

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

Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another.

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme to 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 deteriorating elements [of civilization]. Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.

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.

Toynbee predicted: "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.'"

So far as the Syriac society was related to any older member of the species it was related to the Minoan, and this in the same degree as the Hellenic was related to the Minoan-neither more nor less.

The only real struggle in the history of the world...is between the vested interest and social justice.

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.

On the whole the Aramaean or Syrian element, rather than the Iranian, may be regarded as the deeper influence, and, if we peer back behind the time of troubles, the Iranian element fades out and we catch a glimpse of a society in Syria, in the generation of King Solomon and his contemporary King Hiram, which was just discovering the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and had already discovered the Alphabet. Here at last we have identified the society to which the twin Islamic societies (subsequently combined in one) were affiliated, and we call it the Syriac Society.

Our researches have thus yielded us twenty societies, most of them related as parent or offspring to one or more of the others: namely the Western, the Orthodox, the Iranic, the Arabic (these last two being now united in the Islamic), the Hindu, the Far Eastern, the Hellenic, the Syriac, the Indic, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Indus Culture, the Sumeric, the Hittite, the Babylonic, the Egyptiac, the Andean, the Mexic, the Yucatec and the Mayan.......Indeed it is probably desirable to divide the Orthodox Christian Society into an Orthodox-Byzantine and an Orthodox-Russian society, and the Far Eastern into a Chinese and a Korean-Japanese Society. This would raise our numbers to twenty-two; and since this book was written, a twenty third has come to light: the Shang culture that preceded the Sinic civilization, in the Yellow River Valley.

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.

If we take the antiquity of Man to be something like 300,000 years, then the antiquity of civilizations, so far from being coeval with human history, will be found to cover less than 2 percent of its present span: less than 6,000 years out of 300,000 . On this time-scale , the lives of our twenty-one civilizations-distributed over not more than three generations of societies and concentrated within less than one-fiftieth part of the lifetime of Mankind- must be regarded, on a philosophic view, as contemporary with one another.