Arnold J. Toynbee

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

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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

— Arnold J. Toynbee

Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

… the dogma that History is just "one damned thing after another...."

— Arnold J. Toynbee

Now who are the individuals who are the greatest benefactors of the living generation of mankind? I should say: Confucius and Lao-Tse; the Buddha; the Prophets of Israel and Judah; Zoroaster, Jesus, Muhammad; and Socrates.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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

— Arnold J. Toynbee

The value of the goal lies in the goal itself; and therefore the goal cannot be attained unless it is pursued for its own sake.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

— Arnold J. Toynbee

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

— Arnold J. Toynbee