Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self. - Arnold J. Toynbee

On a stationary military frontier between a civilization and a barbarism, time always works in the barbarians' favour; and, besides this, the barbarians' advantages increases in geometrical progression at each arithmetical addition to the length of the line which the defenders of the civilization have to hold

Society is the total network of relations between human beings. The components of society are thus not human beings but relations between them.

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.