A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6 Quotes

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“Our researches have thus yielded us twenty societies, most of them related as parent or offspring to one or more of the others: namely the Western, the Orthodox, the Iranic, the Arabic (these last two being now united in the Islamic), the Hindu, the Far Eastern, the Hellenic, the Syriac, the Indic, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Indus Culture, the Sumeric, the Hittite, the Babylonic, the Egyptiac, the Andean, the Mexic, the Yucatec and the Mayan.......Indeed it is probably desirable to divide the Orthodox Christian Society into an Orthodox-Byzantine and an Orthodox-Russian society, and the Far Eastern into a Chinese and a Korean-Japanese Society. This would raise our numbers to twenty-two; and since this book was written, a twenty third has come to light: the Shang culture that preceded the Sinic civilization, in the Yellow River Valley.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“Broadly speaking, however, Christianity is a universal church originating in a germ that was alien to the society in which it played its part, while Islam originated in a germ that was indigenous.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“During the deep sleep of the interval (circa A.D. 375-675) which, intervened between the break-up of the Roman Empire and the gradual emergence of our Western Society out of the chaos, a rib was taken, from the side of the older society and was fashioned into the backbone of a new creature of the same species.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“We might pursue the subject farther, but we have, perhaps, said enough to convince the reader that neither race nor environment, taken by itself, can be the positive factor which, within the last six thousand years, has shaken humanity out of its static repose on the level of primitive society and started it on the hazardous quest of civilization. In any case, neither race nor environment, as hitherto envisaged, has offered, or apparently can offer, any clue as to why this great transition in human history occurred not only in particular places but at particular dates.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“We have observed that the germ of creative power in Christianity was not of Hellenic but of alien origin (in fact of Syriac origin, as we can now identify it). By contrast we can observe that the creative germ of Islam was not alien from, but native to, the Syriac Society.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“In our unidentified society when it was united under the Achaemenian Empire we can trace the process of the peaceful ejection of the elements of culture intruded by Assyrian in the gradual replacement of the Akkadian language and cuneiform script by the Aramaic language and alphabet.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“Sparta, for instance, satisfied the land-hunger of her citizens by attacking and conquering her nearest Greek neighbors. The consequence was that Sparta only obtained her additional lands at the cost of obstinate and repeated wars with neighbouring peoples of her own calibre. In order to meet this situation Spartan statesmen were compelled to militarize Spartan life from top to bottom, which they did by re-invigorating and adapting certain primitive social institutions, common to a number of Greek communities, at a moment when, at Sparta as elsewhere, these institutions were on the point of disappearance.

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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“In every case the story opens with a perfect state of Yin. Faust is perfect in knowledge; Job is perfect in goodness and prosperity; Adam and Eve are perfect in innocence and ease; the Virgins— Gretchen, Danae and the rest— are perfect in purity and beauty. In the astronomer’s universe the Sun, a perfect orb, travels on its course intact and whole. When Yin is thus complete, it is ready to pass over into Yang.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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 of troubles, the Iranian element fades out and we catch a glimpse of a society in Syria, in the generation of King Solomon and his contemporary King Hiram, which was just discovering the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and had already discovered the Alphabet. Here at last we have identified the society to which the twin Islamic societies (subsequently combined in one) were affiliated, and we call it the Syriac Society.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“We may express the historical function of the 'Abbasid Caliphate by describing it as a reintegration and resumption of the Achaemenian Empire - a reintegration of a political structure which had been broken up by the impact of an external force and the resumption of a phase of social life which had been interrupted by an alien intrusion.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“As the Macedonian conquest, by breaking up the Achaemenian Empire (i.e. the Persian Empire of Cyrus and his successors), prepared the soil for the seed of Hellenism, so the Arab conquest opened the way for the Umayyads, and after them the 'Abbasids, to reconstruct a universal state which was the equivalent of the Achaemenian Empire.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“Behind the 'Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad we find the Ummayad Caliphate of Damascus, and behind that a thousand years of Hellenic intrusion, beginning with the career of Alexander of Macedon in the latter half of the fourth century B.C., followed by the Greek Seleucid monarchy in Syria, Pompey's campaigns and the Roman conquest, and only ending with the Oriental revanche of the warriors of early Islam in the seventh century after Christ.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“When we compare the pair of Islamic with our pair of Christian societies we see that the Islamic Society which emerged in what we may call the Perso-Turkish or Iranian zone bears a certain resemblance to our Western Society, while the other society, which emerged in what we may call the Arabic zone bears a certain resemblance to Orthodox Christendom. For example, the ghost of the Baghdad Caliphate which was evoked by the Mamluks at Cairo in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era reminds us of the ghost of the Roman Empire which was evoked by Leo the Syrian at Constantinople in the eighth century.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6