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

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”

“The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue”

So, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee had very much more to say than this quartet of snippets, but wow, what a sampling! I only came across these because A.J.T. was b. on this day in history, on the 24th anniversary of the day on which John Wilkes Boothe got himself good & liquored up for a death-dealing at Mr. Ford's theatre. People doing bad things, thinking they're doing good things - that's history for you.