Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.

Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.

We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind.

The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.

The West has never been all of the world that matters.

The West has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed)... It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it has been the world that has been hit - and hit hard - by the West.

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Do not let yourselves be discouraged or embittered by the smallness of the success you are likely to achieve in trying to make life better. You certainly would not be able, in a single generation, to create an earthly paradise. Who could expect that? But, if you make life ever so little better, you will have done splendidly, and your lives will have been worthwhile.

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

Religion holds the solution to all problems of human relationship, whether they are between parents and children or nation and nation. Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

A life which does not go into action is a failure.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

The aim of all education is, or should be, to teach people to educate themselves.

The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.

Immaturity means self-centeredness, inability to compromise, to rise above hurt feelings, to postpone immediate pleasures in favor of future benefits, or to do unpleasant chores when they need to be done.

I believe that a religious conversion is the only way to stimulate the peoples of the industrialized nations to be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of esho funi (the oneness of self and environment). ... I wish the entire world would accept as an item of religious faith the concept of esho funi and its moral obligations.

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.

History is a vision of God's creation on the move.

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.

We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.

The course of human history consists of a series of encounters between individual human beings and God in which each man and woman or child, in turn, is challenged by God to make his free choice between doing God's will and refusing to do it.

The only real struggle in the history of the world .

.. is between the vested interest and social justice.

Man's true end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.