Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

If the market is left to sort matters out, social injustice will be heightened and suffering in the community will grow with the neglect the market fosters.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

The world has grown rich and refined, but chiefly by the efforts of those who themselves continue poor and ignorant.

I would be with those who say the hierarchy in the United States has badly mishandled this whole situation.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

People can be so apathetic. They continue to ignore the real people trapped in poverty and homelessness. It's almost maddening.

Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look.

Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

The world is an enormous injustice.

It is my duty to voice the suffering of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

Progress is always relative: to the oppressed, it can only be viewed as an all or nothing deal - if oppression continues, even in a modified form, then the system must still be attacked until that injustice is eradicated.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?