Arnold J. Toynbee quotes

Arnold J. Toynbee was a British historian, philosopher of history, and author, best known for his twelve-volume work "A Study of History." His analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations greatly influenced twentieth-century thought about history and society. He is remembered for his cyclical theory of civilizations and his comparative approach to historical study. Here are 59 of his quotes:

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Arnold J. 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 J. Toynbee

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.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

Arnold J. 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 J. Toynbee

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.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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

Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

Arnold J. Toynbee

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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

Arnold J. Toynbee

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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

Arnold J. 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.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Now 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 J. Toynbee

History is a vision of God's creation on the move.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Aurangzeb's purpose in building those three mosques was the same intentionally offensive political purpose that moved the Russians to build their Orthodox cathedral in the city-centre at Warsaw. Those mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism's holiest of holy places. I must say that Aurangzeb had a veritable genius for picking out provocative sites. Aurangzeb and Philip II of Spain are a pair. They are incarnations of the gloomily fanatical vein in the Christian - Muslim - Jewish family of religions. Aurangzeb - poor wretched misguided bad man - spent a lifetime of hard labour in raising massive monuments to his own discredit. Perhaps the Poles were really kinder in destroying the Russians' self-discrediting monument in Warsaw than you have been in sparing Aurangzeb's mosques.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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

Arnold J. Toynbee