Faith & Spirit Quote by Arnold J. Toynbee

Toynbee’s line lands like a rebuke to two of humanity’s favorite alibis: providence and inevitability. Coming from a historian best known for tracking how civilizations rise, ossify, and collapse, the sentence is doing more than offering a pep talk about “agency.” It’s a polemic against the comforting story that history is a machine with pre-set outcomes, or a morality play whose author is safely offstage. If you can blame God or “nature,” you can stop asking what your society has chosen to tolerate, fund, excuse, or normalize.

The phrasing matters. “Endowed” nods to religious language, then immediately refuses the escape hatch that religion can provide when it’s used as a liability shield. “Shuffle off” carries a faint Shakespearean contempt: the responsibility isn’t being reasoned away; it’s being slipped away with sleight-of-hand. Toynbee knows how often nations mythologize their own disasters as fate. Empires don’t just “decline”; people choose short-term comfort over reform, scapegoats over self-critique, purity over pluralism.

The subtext is postwar and modern: after industrialized slaughter, genocides, and the bureaucratic rationality of atrocity, “we had no choice” becomes an obscenity. Toynbee pushes back on deterministic habits of mind - biological (“it’s human nature”), theological (“God willed it”), historical (“progress demanded it”). His insistence, doubled in that final sentence, is a historian’s moral wager: the past is crowded with contingencies, and the future is not a verdict but a bill.