“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.
More about “The World and the West” →
“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
“Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“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“A life which does not go into action is a 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 sourceMore quotes by Arnold J. Toynbee →
“Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself, but falsehood.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Man cannot live by technology alone.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source