Arnold Toynbee

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

— Arnold Toynbee

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

— Arnold Toynbee

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

— Arnold Toynbee

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

— Arnold Toynbee

We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.

— Arnold Toynbee

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 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 up to us.

— Arnold Toynbee

Do not let yourselves be discouraged or embittered by the smallness of the success you are likely to achieve in trying to make life better. You certainly would not be able, in a single generation, to create an earthly paradise. Who could expect that? But, if you make life ever so little better, you will have done splendidly, and your lives will have been worthwhile.

— Arnold 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 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 Toynbee