Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kulturen blühen auf, wenn auf Fragen von heute Antworten von Morgen gegeben werden.
Kulturen zerfallen, wenn für Probleme von heute Antworten von gestern gegeben werden.

So far all is plain, but further search brings us up against complications. The first is that the predecessor of the Islamic society (not yet identified) proves to be the parent not of a single offspring but of twins, in this respect resembling the parental achievement of the Hellenic society. The conduct of the pairs of twins has been, however, strikingly dissimilar; for, whereas the Western and the Orthodox Society have survived for over a thousand years side by side, one of the offspring of the parent society which we are seeking to identify swallowed up and incorporated the other. We shall call these twin societies the Iranic and the Arabic.

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.

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.

Thus three factors mark the transition from the old to the new society: a universal state as the final stage of the old society; a church developed in the old society and in turn developing the new; and the chaotic intrusion of a barbarian heroic age. Of these factors, the second is the most, and the third the least, significant.

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.

"These societies have no common characteristic beyond the fact that all of them are "intelligible fields of study ", and this characteristic is so vague and general that it can be turned to no practical account."

All human work is imperfect, because human nature is and this intrinsic imperfection of human affairs cannot be overcome by procrastination.

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

The conversion, which was really the beginning of all things in English history, was the direct antithesis of that; it was an act which merged half a dozen isolated communities of barbarians in the common weal of a nascent Western Society.

When we Westerners call people 'natives' we implicitly take the colour out of our perception of them. We see them as wild animals infesting the country in which we happen to come across them, as part of the local flora and fauna and not as men of like passions with ourselves. So long as we think of them as 'natives' we may exterminate them or, as is more likely to-day, domesticate them and honestly (perhaps not altogether mistakenly) believe that we are improving the breed, but we do not begin to understand them.