Quotes by Arnold Toynbee

“I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.”

“A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.”

“Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.”

“Christian soldiers armed with virtue- hearts afire with blind obsession, cannot see the difference twixt compassion and oppression”

“Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.”

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.”

We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domestic plants and animals but rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.

We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization in which people have dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race.

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

Civilization is a movement - not a condition a voyage - not a harbour.

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

The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality.

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