Top 79 Toynbee Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon ... remarkable ... This is a book that I could wish everyone to read. It is a book which should help us feel more clearly
Philip Toynbee
#3. The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults ...
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
#4. The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#5. 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
#7. 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 that they fail to meet.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#8. Most people come to fear not death itself, but the many terrible ways of dying.
Polly Toynbee
#9. Crime is only the worst example, but it is a paradigm for other Labour policy disasters. No one tells the voters that crime is falling: let them stay scared senseless.
Polly Toynbee
#10. Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#11. But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.
Polly Toynbee
#13. Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust of women's bodies.
Polly Toynbee
#14. Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#15. If it's to be, it's up to me.
to which I add;
If not now ... then when?
Andrew Toynbee
#16. Human dignity can be achieved only in the field of ethics, and ethical achievement is measured by the degree in which our actions are governed by compassion and love, not by greed and aggressiveness.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#17. The penalty of affluence is that it cuts one off from the common lot, common experience, and common fellowship. In a sense it outlaws one automatically from one's birthright of membership in the great human family.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#18. Write regularly, day in and day out, at whatever times of day you find that you write best. Don't wait till you feel that you are in the mood. Write, whether you are feeling inclined to write or not.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#19. Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.
Arnold Toynbee
#20. 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
#21. Love's way of dealing with us is different from conscience's way. Conscience commands; love inspires. What we do out of love, we do because we want to.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. No being can be what he is unless he is putting his essence into action in his field.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#25. The course of human history consists of a series of encounters between individual human beings and God in which each man and woman or child, in turn, is challenged by God to make his free choice between doing God's will and refusing to do it.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#27. Our western science is a child of moral virtues; and it must now become the father of further moral virtues if its extraordinary material triumphs in our time are not to bring human history to an abrupt, unpleasant and discreditable end.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#28. But how odd that in this heathen nation of empty pews, where churches' bare, ruined choirs are converted into luxury loft living, a Labour government - yes, a Labour government - is deliberately creating a huge expansion of faith schools.
Polly Toynbee
#29. But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.
Polly Toynbee
#30. One in six people suffer depression or a chronic anxiety disorder. These are not the worried well but those in severe mental pain with conditions crippling enough to prevent them living normal lives.
Polly Toynbee
#31. Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified.
Polly Toynbee
#32. Inequality makes everyone unhappy, the poor most of all, and that is well within the remit of the state. More money gives less extra happiness the richer we get, yet we are addicted to earning and spending more every year.
Polly Toynbee
#33. The strongest predictor of unhappiness is anyone who has had a mental illness in the last 10 years. It is an even stronger predictor of unhappiness than poverty - which also ranks highly.
Polly Toynbee
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?
Polly Toynbee
#37. Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them, they have ensured that I shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#38. The aim of all education is, or should be, to teach people to educate themselves.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#39. It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy.
Polly Toynbee
#40. I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#41. Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#42. Is anyone serious about the politics of happiness? David Cameron dipped a toe in the water, using the word lightly, but denying the hard policies it implies. Labour shies away from it, but should take up the challenge.
Polly Toynbee
#43. 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
#44. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#46. So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.
Polly Toynbee
#47. My Lords temporal, today is the day to rise up against the regiment of Lords spiritual and proclaim the values of enlightenment, compassion and common sense.
Polly Toynbee
#48. A bomb under the West car park at Twickenham on an international day would end fascism in England for a generation.
Philip Toynbee
#49. People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.
Polly Toynbee
#50. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#51. The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#52. Could a government dare to set out with happiness as its goal? Now that there are accepted scientific proofs, it would be easy to audit the progress of national happiness annually, just as we monitor money and GDP.
Polly Toynbee
#53. The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end.
Polly Toynbee
#54. Adversity in the things of this world opens the door for spiritual salvation.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#55. There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#56. The only real struggle in the history of the world ... is between the vested interest and social justice.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
#57. This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom but between reason and superstition.
Polly Toynbee
#58. 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
#59. We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#61. Immaturity means self-centeredness, inability to compromise, to rise above hurt feelings, to postpone immediate pleasures in favor of future benefits, or to do unpleasant chores when they need to be done.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#62. Material power that is not counterbalanced by adequate spiritual power, that is, by love and wisdom, is a curse
Arnold J. Toynbee
#63. The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#64. Openness about death has led to greater care about all aspects of dying.
Polly Toynbee
#65. Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.
Polly Toynbee
#66. In the polls, over 80% support the right to die and have done for the last 25 years. Even 80% of practising Catholics and Protestants support it, plus 76% of Church Times readers.
Polly Toynbee
#67. 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
#68. My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.
Polly Toynbee
#69. 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
#70. The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#71. The absolute value of love makes life worth while, and so makes Man's strange and difficult situation acceptable. Love cannot save life from death; but it can fulfill life's purpose.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#72. 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
#73. Working lives are for the state to influence. Unemployment makes people unhappy. So does instability.
Polly Toynbee
#75. I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#76. My advice to any traveler who is traveling in order to learn would be: 'Fight tooth and nail to be permitted to travel in what is technically the least efficient way.'
Arnold J. Toynbee
#77. Nothing keeps people together like the exalted conviction that they alone are to be spared that eternal anguish of hell fire to which everyone else will be condemned.
Polly Toynbee
#79. 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
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