Arnold J. Toynbee's Quotes

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

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.

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.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

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