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.

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• America

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

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• City

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

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• Civilization

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

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• Civilization

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

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• Civilization

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

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• work

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.

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• society

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.

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• Birth

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.

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• Freedom

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.

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• Goals

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.

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• Responsibility

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.

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• Success

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.

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• action

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

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• america

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

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• city

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

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• believe

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

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• history

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.

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• apathy

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

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• belief

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

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• advertising

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.

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• appeared

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

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• failure

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

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• power

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.

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• achievements