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“ ”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 (April 14, 1889 – October 22, 1975) was a British historian and the nephew of Arnold Toynbee.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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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.
The sunsets and sunrises of civilization are inevitably separated by intervals of isolated darkness. The night that followed the Roman sunset was long and uncertain, and the turmoil it brought consumed countless man. But mankind itself did not yield. With its gaze fixed on a distant future, it persevered. Until the first rays of a new dawn at long last penetrated the horizon.
The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults...