ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE

Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

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.

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.

I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.

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.

A life which does not go into action is a failure.

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.

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

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

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

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

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.

History is a vision of God's creation on the move.

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.

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

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

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.

The malignity and inhumanity of the Greek military authorities are undisguised.

The free, self-determining, self-developing soul may not walk its own path, however innocently, but must fit into the scheme and pattern …

The secret of progress, the perpetual satisfying of wants followed by the springing up of new wants, is the secret of individual unrest and disappointment.

In no great religious movement has philanthropy been very strong, or rather sentiment or pity---The consciousness of sin has been too strong.

To make a politic speech is like being carried up a flight of steps by the pressure of a crowd.

It is well that the beaten ways of the world get trodden into mud : we are thus forced to seek new paths and pick out new lines of life.

We ascend the hill-tops of philosophy, not to gaze up at the ever-visible heavens, but to embrace in one grand view the human world beneath us.