36 Arnold Joseph Toynbee Quotes

Arnold Joseph Toynbee quotes

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

2. 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.

3. 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.

   Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

4. 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

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

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

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

8. Angkor is not orchestral; it is monumental. It is an epic poem which makes its effect, like the Odyssey and like Paradise Lost, by the grandeur of its structure as well as by the beauty of the details; an epic in rectangular forms imposed upon the Cambodian jungle.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor.

12. Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

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

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

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

16. I don't believe a committee can write a book. It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps, but I don't believe it can write a book.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

17. 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.

18. 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.

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

20. The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

21. 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.

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

23. The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.

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

25. There is a kind of intellectual provincialism in the dogma that 'life is just one damned thing after another.' Human affairs do not become intelligible until they are seen as a whole.

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

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. When I had got my notes all written out I thought I'd polish it off in two summers, but it took me twenty-seven years.

30. When I was a child, the institution of war, which by then had been in existence for perhaps five thousand years, was still taken for granted by most people in the world as a normal and acceptable fact of life. One small religious community, the Society of Friends, was at this time singular in condemning war as immoral and consequently refusing to have any part or lot in war-making.

31. It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history , the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way. Here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together in to a single family.

32. So now we turn to India. This spiritual gift, that makes a man human, is still alive in Indian souls. Go on giving the world Indian examples of it. Nothing else can do so much to help mankind to save itself from destruction.

33. There may or may not be only one single absolute truth and only one single ultimate way of salvation. We do not know. But we do know that there are more approaches to truth than one, and more means of salvation than one.''''This is a hard saying for adherents of the higher religions of the Judaic family (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but it is a truism for Hindus. The spirit of mutual good-will, esteem, and veritable love ... is the traditional spirit of the religions of the Indian family. This is one of India's gifts to the world.

34. Toynbee predicted: 'At the close of this century, the world would be dominated by the West, but that in the 21st century 'India will conquer her conquerors.''

1. “The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults...”

2. “Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into 'soul' and 'body' is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body... Someone who accepts—as I myself do, taking it on trust—the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more 'scientifically' if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit.”