Quotes by Arnold 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.”

“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.”

“A life which does not go into action is a failure”

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

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

“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.”

“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”

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

“When I had got my notes all written out I thought Id polish it off in two summers, but it took me twenty-seven years”

“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.”

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

“A city that outdistances mans walking powers is a trap for man.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Postpone not a good action”

“It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.”

“We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of men and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.”