Arnold J. Toynbee > Quotes

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph 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 Joseph Toynbee

“The only real struggle in the history of the world...is between the vested interest and social justice.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements [of civilization]. Only birth can conquer death―the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“A life which does not go into action is a failure.”
― Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged

“Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee

“Society is the total network of relations between human beings. The components of society are thus not human beings but relations between them.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“We are not doomed to make history repeat itself; it is open to us, through our own efforts, to give history, in our case, some new and unprecedented turn. As human beings, we are endowed with this freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee

“Encounters taking the form of challenge-and-response are the most illuminating kind of events a for student of human affairs if he believes, as I believe, that one of the most distinctive characteristics of Man is the he is partially free to make choices.... Encounters are the occasions in human life on which freedom and creativity come into play and on which new things are brought into existence.”
― Arnold J. Toynbee

“The weak spot of religion is its ridiculousness”
― Toynbee Arnold Joseph

“The difference between a humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree”
― Toynbee Arnold Joseph

“Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“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.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, Experiences

“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 Toynbee

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

“A society, we may say, is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems which each member has to solve for itself as best it may. The presentation of each problem is a challenge to undergo an ordeal, and through this series of ordeals the members of the society progressively differentiate themselves from one another.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“Kulturen blühen auf, wenn auf Fragen von heute Antworten von Morgen gegeben werden.
Kulturen zerfallen, wenn für Probleme von heute Antworten von gestern gegeben werden.”
― Arnold Toynbee

“When we Westerners call people 'natives' we implicitly take the colour out of our perception of them. We see them as wild animals infesting the country in which we happen to come across them, as part of the local flora and fauna and not as men of like passions with ourselves. So long as we think of them as 'natives' we may exterminate them or, as is more likely to-day, domesticate them and honestly (perhaps not altogether mistakenly) believe that we are improving the breed, but we do not begin to understand them.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play”
― Arnold Toynbee

“Our researches have thus yielded us twenty societies, most of them related as parent or offspring to one or more of the others: namely the Western, the Orthodox, the Iranic, the Arabic (these last two being now united in the Islamic), the Hindu, the Far Eastern, the Hellenic, the Syriac, the Indic, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Indus Culture, the Sumeric, the Hittite, the Babylonic, the Egyptiac, the Andean, the Mexic, the Yucatec and the Mayan.......Indeed it is probably desirable to divide the Orthodox Christian Society into an Orthodox-Byzantine and an Orthodox-Russian society, and the Far Eastern into a Chinese and a Korean-Japanese Society. This would raise our numbers to twenty-two; and since this book was written, a twenty third has come to light: the Shang culture that preceded the Sinic civilization, in the Yellow River Valley.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“If we take the antiquity of Man to be something like 300,000 years, then the antiquity of civilizations, so far from being coeval with human history, will be found to cover less than 2 percent of its present span: less than 6,000 years out of 300,000 . On this time-scale , the lives of our twenty-one civilizations-distributed over not more than three generations of societies and concentrated within less than one-fiftieth part of the lifetime of Mankind- must be regarded, on a philosophic view, as contemporary with one another.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol 1: Introduction; The Geneses of Civilizations

“Athens reacted to the population problem in a different way again. She specialized her agricultural production for export, started manufactures also for export and then developed her political institutions so as to give a fair share of political power to the new classes which had been called into being by these economic innovations. In other words, Athenian statesmen averted a social revolution by successfully carrying through an economic and political revolution; and, discovering this solution of the common problem in so far as it affected themselves, they incidentally opened up a new avenue of advance for the whole of the Hellenic Society.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“The sunsets and sunrises of civilization are inevitably separated by intervals of isolated darkness. The night that followed the Roman sunset was long and uncertain, and the turmoil it brought consumed countless man. But mankind itself did not yield. With its gaze fixed on a distant future, it persevered. Until the first rays of a new dawn at long last penetrated the horizon.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee

“Broadly speaking, however, Christianity is a universal church originating in a germ that was alien to the society in which it played its part, while Islam originated in a germ that was indigenous.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

“During the deep sleep of the interval (circa A.D. 375-675) which, intervened between the break-up of the Roman Empire and the gradual emergence of our Western Society out of the chaos, a rib was taken, from the side of the older society and was fashioned into the backbone of a new creature of the same species.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6