Carroll Quigley Quotes

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The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training.

Carroll Quigley
When goods are exchanged between countries, they must be paid for by commodities or gold. They cannot be paid for by the notes, certificates, and checks of the purchaser's country, since these are of value only in the country of issue.

Carroll Quigley
... we were brainwashed into believing... that the only important thing was individualism. They called it freedom. There is no such thing as freedom. There is something called liberty; it's quite different.... read [Guido de] Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism... Freedom is freedom from restraints. We're always under restraints.

Carroll Quigley
Persons, personalities if you wish, can only be made in communities.

Carroll Quigley
The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.

Carroll Quigley
Our political organization, based as it is on an eighteenth-century separation of powers and on a nineteenth-century nationalist state, is generally recognized to be semiobselete.

Carroll Quigley
It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching from it some factor that influenced it.

Carroll Quigley
This priesthood became a closed group, able to control enormous wealth and incomes, and concerned very largely with the study of the solar and astronomical periodicities on which there influence was originally based. With the surplus thus created, the priesthood was able to command human labor in huge amounts and to direct this labor from the simple tillage of the peasant peoples to the diversified and specialized activities that constitute civilized living.

Carroll Quigley
... empires and civilizations do not collapse because of deficiencies on the military or the political levels.

Carroll Quigley
The appearance of stability from 1840 to about 1900 was superficial, temporary and destructive in the long run... because communities and societies must rest upon cooperation and not upon competition. Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community.

Carroll Quigley
Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.

Carroll Quigley
... a state is not the same thing as a society, although the Greeks and Romans thought it was. A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.

Carroll Quigley
Men have social needs. They have a need for other people; they have a need to love and be loved.

Carroll Quigley
A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders.

Carroll Quigley
Every civilization must be organized in such a way that it has invention, capital accumulation, and investment.

Carroll Quigley
When we approach history, we are dealing with a conglomeration of irrational continua. Those who deal with history by nonrational processes are the ones who make history, the actors in it.

Carroll Quigley
The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.

Carroll Quigley
The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method for investigating experience... Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values.

Carroll Quigley
... the levels of culture, the aspects of society: military, political, economic, social, emotional, religious, and intellectual. Those are your basic human needs.... they are arranged in evolutionary sequence.

Carroll Quigley
When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularized religions like Marxism.

Carroll Quigley
[Increasing] politicization means the [economic] expansion is slowing up and you are no longer attempting to achieve increased output per capita, or increased wealth, or increased satisfactions... but you are doing so by mobilizing power. We have seen this going on for almost a century.... increased militarization.

Carroll Quigley
The fundamental, all-pervasive cause of world instability is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neuroses and psychoses. The technological acceleration of transportation, communication and weapons systems is now creating power areas wider than existing political structures.

Carroll Quigley
When Rome fell, the Christian answer was, "Create our own communities."

Carroll Quigley
... in the last thousand years. If we go back before [AD] 976... the main core of people's life and experience... was in the religious, emotional and social levels. They had religious beliefs, they had social and emotional relationships with people they saw every day.... controls and rewards were internalized.... This is why they could get along without a state in 976: all the significant controls were internalized.

Carroll Quigley
No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.

Carroll Quigley
Inflation, especially a slow steady rise in prices, encourages producers, because it means that they can commit themselves to costs of production on one price level and then, later, offer the finished product for sale at a somewhat higher price level. This situation encourages production because it gives confidence of an almost certain profit margin.

Carroll Quigley
... they have brainwashed us into believing in the last 150 years... that quantitative change is superior to qualitative attributes. If we can turn out more... it doesn't matter if they're half as good.... We're quantifying everything, and that is why we're trying to put everything on computers. Governments will no longer have to make decisions; computers will do it.

Carroll Quigley
When these extremists argued for "either-or," the Western tradition answered "both!"

Carroll Quigley
A community is made up of intimate relationships among diversified types of individuals—a kinship group, a local group, a neighborhood, a village, a large family.

Carroll Quigley
In its final stages the civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals.

Carroll Quigley