“Technology is, of course, only a long Greek name for a bag of tools; and we have to ask ourselves: What are the tools that count in this competition in the use of tools as means to power?”
Arnold J. Toynbee
The World and the West (Primary source)
Arnold Toynbee’s The World and the West, based on his 1952 BBC Reith Lectures, reverses the usual story of Western expansion by asking how non-Western societies experienced and responded to Western intrusion.
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“Technology is, of course, only a long Greek name for a bag of tools; and we have to ask ourselves: What are the tools that count in this competition in the use of tools as means to power? A power-loom or a locomotive is obviously a tool for this purpose, as well as a gun, an aeroplane, or a bomb. But all tools are not of the material kind; there are spiritual tools as well, and these are the most potent that Man has made. A creed, for instance, can be a tool; and, in the new round in the competition between Russia and the West that began in 1917, the Russians this time threw into their scale of the balances a creed [communism] that weighed as heavily against their Western competitors’ material tools.”
Arnold J. Toynbee
“History, in the objective meaning of the word, is the process of change; in the subjective meaning, it is the study of how and why one situation changes into another.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“The contact of civilisations has always been, and will always continue to be, a ruling factor in human progress and failure.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“The statesmen miscalculated again. Their fellow-countrymen had the means to carry out their policy but not the will; their pawns had the will without the means.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“A cultivated class, for example, finds most difficulty in getting on with another which has acquired part—but only part—of its culture and customs.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary sourceMore quotes by Arnold J. Toynbee →
“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Wish not so much to live long as to live well.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source