Top 20 Quotes by Arnold J. Toynbee

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

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

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

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

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

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

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.

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.

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

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.