Arnold Joseph Toynbee Quotes & Sayings

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. — Arnold Joseph 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

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

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair. — Arnold Joseph 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 Joseph 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

Society is the total network of relations between human beings. The components of society are thus not human beings but relations between them. — 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 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 Joseph 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

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 Joseph Toynbee

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

A life which does not go into action is a failure. — Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another. — Arnold Joseph Toynbee