Quotes by 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.
• 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.
• Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.
• The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.
• 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.
• To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.
• The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.
• I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
• The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
• 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.
• 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.
• History is a vision of God's creation on the move.
• Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
• Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
• 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.
• 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.
• America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
• A life which does not go into action is a failure.
• A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.
• I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.