Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

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.

An individual’s adherence to a certain faith is often determined by the geographical accident of the locality of his birth-place.

The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults...

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

Athens reacted to the population problem in a different way again. She specialized her agricultural production for export, started manufactures also for export and then developed her political institutions so as to give a fair share of political power to the new classes which had been called into being by these economic innovations. In other words, Athenian statesmen averted a social revolution by successfully carrying through an economic and political revolution; and, discovering this solution of the common problem in so far as it affected themselves, they incidentally opened up a new avenue of advance for the whole of the Hellenic Society.

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.

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

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

So now we turn to India. This spiritual gift, that makes a man human, is still alive in Indian souls. Go on giving the world Indian examples of it. Nothing else can do so much to help mankind to save itself from destruction.

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

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

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