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 o… - Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

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

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.