Quotable Toynbee

“Every stable society imposes on the majority of its members the social and economic attitudes of its beneficiaries.

“A corollary to this obvious, but seldom applied, law is that a society is constantly evolving a new language of automatic self-justification.

“This language is to be found in its most polished and accomplished form on the leader-pages of all those newspapers which defend the existing social system. ... [It] is by scarcely disguised moral arguments that we are constantly urged to accept the present structure of our society.”

– Philip Toynbee (1965), in Encounter magazine, Stephen Spender & Melvin J. Lasky, eds.