Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes
A British historian and the nephew of Arnold Toynbee.
(1889 - 1975)
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A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.
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A life which does not go into action is a failure.
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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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Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them, they have ensured that I shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.
[Anxiety]
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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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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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Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
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Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.
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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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Enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and sec ond, a definite, intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.
[Enthusiasm]
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History is a vision of God's creation on the move.
[History]
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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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History teaches us that when a barbarian race confronts a sleeping culture, the barbarian always wins.
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I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.
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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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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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So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.
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Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.
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The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.
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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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