“Technology is, of course, only a long Greek name for a bag of tools; and we have to ask ourselves: What are the tools that count in this competition in the use of tools as means to power?”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“The most obvious way of reconciling oneself to death is to make sure of enjoying life before death snatches it from us.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“Man cannot live by technology alone.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“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.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“They rushed into it with their eyes open because they could not resist the bait.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“Failure cuts deepter memories than success.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“We have invented machines to work for us, but have less spare labor than ever before for human service.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“The fact that I am neither a Greek nor a Turk perhaps creates little presumption of my being fair-minded, for Western partisans of non-Western peoples are often more fanatical than their favourites.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“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 Primary source“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 behind it.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“A cultivated class, for example, finds most difficulty in getting on with another which has acquired part—but only part—of its culture and customs.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding moral 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 Primary source“A life which does not go into action is a failure.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“The statesmen miscalculated again. Their fellow-countrymen had the means to carry out their policy but not the will; their pawns had the will without the means.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“Biologists tell us that animal species which have adapted themselves too nicely to highly specialized environments are at a dead end and have no future in the evolutionary process.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“The contact of civilisations has always been, and will always continue to be, a ruling factor in human progress and failure.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“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.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“More often geographical expansion is a concomitant of real decline and coincides with a ‘time of troubles’ or a universal state—both of them stages of decline and disintegration. The reason is not far to seek. Times of trouble produce militarism, which is a perversion of the human spirit into channels of mutual destruction, and the most successful militarist becomes, as a rule, the founder of a universal state. Geographical expansion is a by-product of this militarism, in interludes when the mighty men of valour turn aside from their assaults upon their rivals within their own society to deliver assaults upon neighbouring societies.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“The history of the development of technique, like the history of geographical expansion, has failed to provide us with a criterion of the growth of civilizations, but it does reveal a principle by which technical progress is governed, which may be described as a law of progressive simplification. The ponderous and bulky steam-engine with its elaborate ‘permanent way’ is replaced by the neat and handy internal-combustion engine which can take to the roads with the speed of a railway train and almost all the freedom of action of a pedestrian. Telegraphy with wires is replaced by telegraphy without wires. The incredibly complicated scripts of the Sinic and Egyptiac societies are replaced by the neat and handy Latin Alphabet.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Disputed“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 J. Toynbee DisputedWilliam Ralph Inge Gerald Heard Franklin D. Roosevelt Caspar Weinberger Henry David Thoreau