Jump to content

Arnold J. Toynbee

From Wikiquote
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee (14 April 1889 – 22 October 1975) was a British historian and the nephew of Arnold Toynbee.

Quotes

[edit]
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.
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.
  • 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.
    • "A Turning Point in Man's Destiny", The New York Times Magazine (26 December 1954) p. 5
  • I don’t believe a committee can write a book. ... It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps. But I don’t believe it can write a book.
    • Interviewed by Christopher Wright (1955). Printed in James Nelson (ed.) Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day (New York: Norton, 1958) p. 208
  • [T]he equation of religion with belief is rather recent.
    • Christianity Among the Religions of the World (New York: Scribner's, 1957) p. 7
  • India is the central link in a chain of regional civilizations that extends from Japan in the far north-east to Ireland in the far northwest. Between these two extremities the chain sags down southwards in a festoon that dips below the Equator in Indonesia.
    • Azad Memorial Lectures, One World and India (Calcutta: Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 1960) p. 41. Cited in B. L. Sharma, Kashmir Awakes (Delhi: Vikas, 1971) p. 52
  • 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.
    • "Man and Hunger: The Perspectives of History", Speech to the World Food Congress (4 June 1963). Printed in K. Y. Ng (ed.) The Population Crisis: Implications and Plans for Action (Indiana UP, 1965) p. 138
  • We have been Godlike in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbitlike in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.
  • [E]very oasis is an island that has water inside it but not round it.
    • Between Niger and Nile (London: Oxford UP, 1965) 20. Cyrenaïca's Green Mountain
  • A city that outdistances Man's walking powers is a trap for Man. It threatens to become a prison from which he cannot escape unless he has mechanical means of transport, the thoroughfares for carrying these, and the purchasing power for commanding the use of artificial means of communication.
    • "Has Man's Metropolitan Environment Any Precedents?", Ekistics, vol. 22, no. 133 (December 1966) pp. 385–7
  • When I was a child, the institution of war, which, by then, had been in existence for perhaps about five thousand years, was still being taken for granted by most people in the World as a normal and acceptable fact of life. One small religious community, the Society of Friends, was at that time singular in condemning war as immoral and in consequently refusing to have any part or lot in war-making.
    • Experiences (New York: Oxford UP, 1969) pt. 2, sect. 4
  • 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.
    • Surviving the Future (1971; Oxford UP, 1972) p. 95
  • 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.
    • The Toynbee-Ikeda Dialogue: Man Himself Must Choose (1976)
  • Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.
    • Foreword to The Transformation of Palestine (Northwestern UP, 1971)

The Trend of International Affairs Since the War (1931)

[edit]
Address to the 1931 Copenhagen conference, printed in International Affairs, vol. 10, no. 6 (November 1931)
The local national state, invested with the attributes of sovereignty — is an abomination of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. It has stood in that place now — demanding and receiving human sacrifices from its poor deluded votaries — for four or five centuries.
  • If we are frank with ourselves, we shall admit that we are engaged on a deliberate and sustained and concentrated effort to impose limitations upon the sovereignty and independence of the fifty or sixty local sovereign independent States which at present partition the habitable surface of the earth and divide the political allegiance of mankind.
    It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep on protesting our loyalty to it so loudly. The harder we press our attack upon the idol, the more pains we take to keep its priests and devotees in a fool’s paradise—lapped in a false sense of security which will inhibit them from taking up arms in their idol’s defense. The local national state, invested with the attributes of sovereignty — is an abomination of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. It has stood in that place now — demanding and receiving human sacrifices from its poor deluded votaries — for four or five centuries. Our political task in our generation is to cast the abomination out, to cleanse the temple and to restore the worship of the divinity to whom the temple rightfully belongs. In plain terms, we have to re-transfer the prestige and the prerogatives of sovereignty from the fifty or sixty fragments of contemporary society to the whole of contemporary society — from the local national states by which sovereignty has been usurped, with disastrous consequences, for half a millennium, to some institution embodying our society as a whole.
    In the world as it is today, this institution can hardly be a universal Church. It is more likely to be something like a League of Nations. I will not prophesy. I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands...
    • pp. 808–809

A Study of History (1934–1961)

[edit]
Societies, not states, are 'the social atoms' with which students of history have to deal.
  • Societies, not states, are 'the social atoms' with which students of history have to deal.
    • Vol. 1 (1954 [1934])
  • No collection of facts is ever complete, because the Universe is without bounds. And no synthesis or interpretation is ever final, because there are always fresh facts to be found after the first collection has been provisionally arranged.
    • Vol. 1 (1954 [1934])
  • Compared with the life-span of a human being the time-span of a civilization is so vast that a human observer cannot hope to take the measure of its curve unless he is in a position to view it in a distant perspective; and he can only obtain this perspective vis-a-vis some society that is extinct. He can never stand back sufficiently far from the history of the society in which he himself lives and moves and has his being. In other words, to assert of any living society, at any moment in its life, that it is the consummation of human history is to hazard a guess which is intrinsically unsusceptible of immediate verification. When we find that a majority of the members of all societies at all times make this assertion about their own civilizations, it becomes evident that their guesses have really nothing to do with any objective calculation of probabilities but are pure expressions of the egocentric illusion.
    • Vol. 1 (1954 [1934])
  • The Hellenization of Rome was, of course, the most important cultural conquest that the Hellenes ever achieved at any stage of their history.
    • Vol. 1 (1954 [1934])
  • No being can be what he is unless he is putting his essence into action in his field.
    • Vol. 3 (1948 [1934])
  • 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.
    • Vol. 4 (1955 [1939]), part B, p. 6
  • 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.
    • Vol. 7 (1954). Also in Civilization on Trial (1957 [1946]) p. 247
  • The difference between a Humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree.
    • Vol. 9 (1954)
  • A life which does not go into action is a failure.
    • Vol. 10 (1954)
  • 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.
    • Vol. 12 (1961)
  • [S]o-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.
  • The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality.
    • Abridgement of Vols. 1–6 by D. C. Somervell (1946)
  • There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.
    • Abridgement of Vols. 7–10 by D. C. Somervell (1957)
  • [T]he dogma that History is just "one damned thing after another..."
    • Abridgement of Vols. 7–10 by D. C. Somervell (1957), "Law and Freedom in History". The embedded quotation is attributable to Elbert Hubbard
  • History [is] a vision of God's creation on the move.
    • Abridgement of Vols. 7–10 by D. C. Somervell (1957)

Civilization on Trial (1948)

[edit]
Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
  • 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, in extremis or post mortem, we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two. To date, these two plagues have been deadly enough, in partnership, to kill off nineteen out of twenty representatives of this recently evolved species of human society; but, up to now, the deadliness of these scourges has had a saving limit.
    • Ch. 2: The Present Point in History
  • 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.
    • Ch. 3: Does History Repeat Itself?
  • Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour. No known civilization has, ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance.
    • Ch. 8: Civilization on Trial
    • Variants:
      • Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
        • As quoted in Reader's Digest (October 1958)
      • Civilization is a movement, not a condition. It is a voyage, not a harbor.
        • As quoted in The Social Welfare Forum (1968) by the National Conference on Social Welfare
  • 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.
    • Ch. 8: Civilization on Trial
  • 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.
    • Ch. 10: Islam, the West, and the Future

East to West: A Journey Round the World (1958)

[edit]
New York: Oxford UP
  • These immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land again. What do these great, sleek, well-fed creatures live on so sumptuously?
    • 12. The Elusive Continent (on the six state capitals of Australia)
  • Man is a born geometer. Even when he is expressing himself in curves, as he has done in the undulating roofs of Eastern Asia and in the flowing sculptures at Borobudur, his lines follow mathematical laws that are unknown to Nature; and he is frankly defying her when he works in rectangles. Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to light...
    The Buddhist stupa at Borobudur in Central Java is a lyric poem in stone, flowing round the crown of a hill to the musical accompaniment of a jagged mountain range on one side and a green expanse of rice fields on the other. Angkor is not orchestral; it is monumental. It is an epic poem which makes its effect, like the Odyssey and like Paradise Lost, by the grandeur of its structure as well as by the beauty of the details. Angkor is an epic in rectangular forms imposed upon the Cambodian jungle.
    • 27. Angkor

Attributed

[edit]
  • The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
    • In Ellen J. Langer (ed.) Mindfulness (Merloyd Lawrence Books, 1989) p. 133
  • Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
    • In Mark Steyn, "It's the Demography, Stupid!", Opinion Journal, WSJ (2006). Cited in Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006) ch. 1
  • America is like a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair!
    • In Quote: The Weekly Digest, vol. 23, no. 19 (4 May 1952) p. 16
  • Religion holds the solution to all problems of human relationship, whether they are between parents and children or nation and nation. Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God. When threats force him to look at the limitations of his human power, he’s often ready to seek his spiritual one. What we need is patience and awe of God’s plan in human history!
    • In Quote: The Weekly Digest, vol. 38, no. 19 (8 November 1959) p. 13
  • I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
    • In "Prophet of Hope & Fear" [Review of A Study of History, Vols. 7–10] TIME (18 October 1954) p. 108
  • [I] cannot think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.
    • In David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum, 1963) ch. 11
  • Of the twenty-two civilizations that appear in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. All nations have progressed through this sequence:
    From bondage to spiritual faith
    From spiritual faith to great courage
    From courage to liberty
    From liberty to abundance
    From abundance to selfishness
    From selfishness to complacency
    From complacency to apathy
    From apathy to dependency
    From dependency back again into bondage.
    • In Joe D. Batten and Gail Batten, The Confidence Chasm (New York: American Management Association, 1972) p. 118
  • I guess that both the West and the world are getting to turn away from man — worshipping ideologies — Communism and secular individualism alike — and become converted to an Oriental religion corning neither from Russia nor from the West. I guess that this will be the Christian religion that came to the Greeks and the Romans from Palestine, with one or two elements in traditional Christianity discarded and replaced by a new element from India, I expect and hope that this avatar of Christianity will include the vision of God as being Love. But I also expect and hope that it will discard the other traditional Christian vision of God as being a jealous god, and that it will reject the self-glorification of this jealous god's "chosen people" as being unique. This is where India comes in, with her belief that there may be more than one illuminating and saving approach to the mystery of the universe.
    • In S. Radhakrishnan, East and West: Some Reflections (New York, Harper, [1956]) p. l28. As quoted and attributed in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (2008)
  • The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century.
    • In Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within (NY: Broadway Books, 1997)
  • At the close of this century, the world would be dominated by the West, but that in the 21st century "India will conquer her conquerors."
    • In Arbind and Jagdish Prasad, Development Planning for Agriculture: Policies, Economic Implications (1994) p. 39, and in Swami Prabhavananda, The Spiritual Heritage of India (1979)
  • It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way. Here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together in to a single family.
    • In Salil Gewali, Great Minds on India (New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2013) [1]
  • So now we turn to India. This spiritual gift, that makes a man human, is still alive in Indian souls. Go on giving the world Indian examples of it. Nothing else can do so much to help mankind to save itself from destruction.
  • There may or may not be only one single absolute truth and only one single ultimate way of salvation. We do not know. But we do know that there are more approaches to truth than one, and more means of salvation than one.’’‘‘This is a hard saying for adherents of the higher religions of the Judaic family (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but it is a truism for Hindus. The spirit of mutual good-will, esteem, and veritable love … is the traditional spirit of the religions of the Indian family. This is one of India’s gifts to the world.


Misattributed

[edit]

Quotes about Toynbee

[edit]
  • As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorat-ing elements. Only birth can conquer death-the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.
    • Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Meridian Books, 1956) "The Monomyth", p. 16. Citing A Study of History, Vol. 6, pp. 169–175
  • Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything. For some religions, history provides evidence of the working out of a divine purpose. For the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, it demonstrated the manifestation of the infinite spirit (Geist) on earth. Karl Marx built on Hegel to produce his “scientific” history, which purported to show that history was moving inexorably toward its destined end of full Communism. Johann Gottfried von Herder, the influential German thinker of the late eighteenth century, history showed that an organic German nation had existed for centuries, although in political terms it had not yet reached its full potential. For imperialists like Sir Charles Dilke, the study of the past confirmed the superiority of the British race. Arnold Toynbee, whose work is largely neglected now, saw a pattern of challenge and response as civilizations grew great in overcoming obstacles and then failed as they turned soft and lazy. The Chinese, unlike most Western thinkers, did not see history as a linear process at all. Their scholars talked in terms of a dynastic cycle where dynasties came and went in an unending repetition, following the unchanging pattern of birth, maturity, and death, all under the aegis of heaven.
[edit]
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Retrieved from "https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Arnold_J._Toynbee&oldid=3915215"