Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

Since Mill, in 1848, wrote his chapter on the future of the working classes, the question of the distribution of wealth has be-come of still greater importance. We cannot look round on the political phenomena of to-day without seeing that this question is at the root of them. We see the perplexity in which men stand, and the divisions springing up in our great political parties, because of the uncertainty of politicians how to grapple with it.

The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.

Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of over weening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.

When the war [World War I] closed ... we were challenged with a peacetime choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of ... paternalism and State Socialism.

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

The scope of a modern government has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old “laissez faire” school of political writers, and this widening has met popular approval.

Our elected officials would do well to remember that the most prosperous countries are those that allow consumers - not governments - to direct the use of resources. Allowing the government to pick winners and losers hurts almost everyone, especially our poorest citizens.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

An orthodox belief in big government's inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry's inability to compete with big government.

I don't think that capitalism should be unbridled, if by 'unbridled' you mean unregulated.

My mother - she's a good old classic Northern European socialist - she's totally wonderful, but she raised me up believing that rich people have stolen their money from poor people.

There's a wider agenda that speaks to what the Democratic Party has historically stood for, which are economic rights for those who are struggling in the middle class, concern for the poor, for economic justice for those who are marginalized in our society.

He mocks the people who proposes that the government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor.

It is because of capitalism that we can pay for services to poor people that we don't even know.

Capitalism is economic Darwinism…free enterprise is code for individualistic amorality…the marketplace is the temple of secular humanism.

If work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

Regulation of private enterprise and not Government ownership or operation is the course rightly to be pursued in our relation to business.

A New Dealer regrets poverty and deplores the fact that it is necessary for society to slough off its misfits as an individual sheds his impurities and his diseases. But New Dealers believe that human want and human distress should be prevented or at least ameliorated.

Taxes on acquired wealth would be the fairest solution. But such taxes have met an invincible resistance among the possessors, who are the most powerful. … The selfishness of possessing classes is not reducible. We have to adopt to it.

The profit-grinding system is maintained by competition, or veiled war, not only between the conflicting classes, but also within the classes themselves: there is always war among the workers for bare subsistence, and among their masters, the employers and middle-men, for the share of the profit wrung out of the workers; lastly, there is competition always, and sometimes open war, among the nations of the civilised world for their share of the world-market.

The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities....In all that the people can individually do for themselves, government ought not interfere.

The school of laissez faire, of which you seem to be a pronounced advocate, has produced great men in advocating the theory of each for himself, and his Satanic Majesty taking the hindermost

In the United States you have socialism for the rich and free markets for the poor.