Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The absolute value of love makes life worth while, and so makes Man's strange and difficult situation acceptable. Love cannot save life from death; but it can fulfill life's purpose.

Immaturity means self-centeredness, inability to compromise, to rise above hurt feelings, to postpone immediate pleasures in favor of future benefits, or to do unpleasant chores when they need to be done.

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

The West has never been all of the world that matters. The West has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed) ... It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it has been the world that has been hit - and hit hard - by the West.

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 that they fail to meet.

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.

Material power that is not counterbalanced by adequate spiritual power, that is, by love and wisdom, is a curse

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.

Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

The course of human history consists of a series of encounters between individual human beings and God in which each man and woman or child, in turn, is challenged by God to make his free choice between doing God's will and refusing to do it.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.