“There is a pattern: civilisations rise when they are able to respond creatively to the challenges of the world around them. Civilisations decline when they lose that ability”;

“The components of a society’s culture are the economic, the political and the cultural element proper. When one culture intrudes upon another, the penetrating power of each of these elements is directly opposite to its social value. Thus the economic element is the one that an alien culture adopts most readily, politics comes next, and the cultural element comes last. And this is why the disintegration of an integral culture ends in social catastrophe”;

“This is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life: the surest way to achieve any goal lies in striving not for that goal but for a more distant, far more ambitious one”;

“My first piece of advice to anyone who travels in order to see and to learn: ‘Tooth and nail, win the right to travel in the technically most inefficient way’;**

(Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) was an English historian, sociologist, philosopher of history and cultural theorist. He studied international history and the processes of globalisation, the rise and fall of 26 civilisations in world history, and criticised the concept of Eurocentrism. He is best known for his 12-volume work A Study of History.)