America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair. - Arnold J. Toynbee

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 unity of history'-involving the assumption that there is only one river of civilization, our own, and that all others are either tributary to it or else lost in the desert sands- may be traced to three roots: the egocentric illusion, the illusion of the 'unchanging East', and the illusion of progress as a movement that proceeds in a straight line.

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