9 Quotes by 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.

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

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

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.

The difference between a humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree.

A society, we may say, is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems which each member has to solve for itself as best it may. The presentation of each problem is a challenge to undergo an ordeal, and through this series of ordeals the members of the society progressively differentiate themselves from one another.

The weak spot of religion is its ridiculousness.

Societies, not states, are ‘the social atoms’ with which students of history have to deal.

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.