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"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization."
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"If this is called civilization, then I am afraid humanity is no more civilized than the Tyrannosaurus Rex."
"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."
"This grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on."
"The first requisite of civilization is that of justice."
"A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance."
"After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again."
"Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization."
"What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea."
"A civilized society is formed when every individual in that society are bound to obey the rules and regulation which is for the benefit of their own society."
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
Explore more quotes by Arnold J. Toynbee
"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."
"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."
"I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills."
"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 immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land."
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