Carroll Quigley Quotes

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... they give us vicarious satisfactions for many of our frustrations.... People need exercise; they do not need to watch other people exercise... Another vicarious satisfaction is sexy magazines; this is vicarious sex. To anyone rushing to buy one, I'd like to say, "The real thing is better."

Carroll Quigley
To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.

Carroll Quigley
The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation.

Carroll Quigley
The brainwashing which has been going on for 150 years has also resulted in the replacement of intellectual activities and religion by ideologies and science.... I have nothing against Marx, except that his theories do not explain what happened.

Carroll Quigley
... we no longer have intellectually satisfying arrangements in our educational system, in our arts, humanities or anything else; instead we have slogans and ideologies. An ideology is a religious or emotional expression; it is not an intellectual expression.

Carroll Quigley
The backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels.

Carroll Quigley
When profits are pursued by geographic interchange of goods, so that commerce for profit becomes the central mechanism of the system, we usually call it "commercial capitalism." In such a system goods are conveyed from ares where they are more common (and therefore cheaper) to areas where they are less common (and therefore less cheap). This process leads to regional specialization and to division of labor, both in agricultural production and in handicrafts.

Carroll Quigley
... increasing remoteness of desires from needs.... increasing confusion between means and ends. The ends are human needs... Instead they want the means they have been brainwashed to accept... Never was any society in human history as rich and as powerful as Western Civilization and the United States, and it is not a happy society.

Carroll Quigley
...1776 is a very significant year. and this is not just because the American Revolution began. Watt's patent of the steam engine... Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations... the failure of the French to reorganize their political system occurred in 1776, and so forth.... The destruction of communities, the destruction of religion and the frustration of emotions were greatly intensified by the Industrial Revolution: railroads, factories, growth of cities, technological revolution in the countryside and in the growing of food and so forth.

Carroll Quigley
No slave system has ever been able to continue to function on the slaves provided by its own biological reproduction because the rate of human reproduction is too slow and the expense from infant mortality and years of unproductive upkeep of the young make this prohibitively expensive. This relationship is one of the basic causes of the American Civil War, and was even more significant in destroying ancient Rome.

Carroll Quigley
Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

Carroll Quigley
The vested interests encourage the growth of imperialist wars and irrationality because both serve to divert the discontent of the masses away from their vested interests (the uninvested surplus).

Carroll Quigley
Closely related to the erroneous idea that science is a body of knowledge is the equally erroneous idea that scientific theories are true.

Carroll Quigley
For years I have told my students that I been trying to train executives rather than clerks. The distinction between the two is parallel to the distinction previously made between understanding and knowledge. It is a mighty low executive who cannot hire several people with command of more knowledge than he has himself.

Carroll Quigley
Our society has so cluttered our lives with artifacts [man-made things]... and organizational structures that [our] moment to moment relationships with nature are almost impossible.

Carroll Quigley
The fundamentalist position on biblical interpretation, with its emphasis on the explicit, complete, final, and authoritarian nature of Scripture, is a very late, minority view quite out of step with the Western tradition.

Carroll Quigley
One of the chief reasons for the widespread fear of the Huns rested on their ability to travel very long distances in relatively short periods. This ability may well have been based on their use of horseshoes.

Carroll Quigley
No culture has ever exceeded Western civilization in power and extent. Our society now covers more than half of the globe, extending in space from Poland to the east of Australia i n the west. In the course of this expansion, most of it during the last five centuries, the power of Western civilization has been so great that it has destroyed, almost without thinking of it, hundreds of other societies, including five or six other civilizations.

Carroll Quigley
We have now done what the Romans did when they started to commit suicide. We have shifted from an army of citizens to an army of mercenaries...

Carroll Quigley
The economic and technological achievements of industrialization in this period were fundamentally mistaken.... based upon plundering the natural capital of the globe that was created over millions of years: the plundering of the soils and their fertility; the plundering of human communities whether they were our own or someone else's.

Carroll Quigley
The link between a society, whether it be made up of communities or individuals, and a state is this: Power rests on the ability to satisfy human needs.

Carroll Quigley
The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act.

Carroll Quigley
Another thing that they have tried to get us to believe in the last 150 years... is that the nation as the repository of sovereignty can be both a state and a community.... Why did the English, the French, the Castilians, the Hohenzollerns, and others become the repository of sovereignty as nations... They did so because... weapons made it possible to compel obedience over areas which were approximately the size of these national groups... nationalism is an episode in history, and it fit a certain power structure and a certain configuration in human life in our civilization. Now... They all want autonomy.... The nation or the state, as we now have it as the structure of power, cannot be a community.

Carroll Quigley
This book is not a history. Rather it is an attempt to establish analytical tools that will assist the understanding of history

Carroll Quigley
The range of human potentialities is also the range of human needs because of man's vital drive that impels him to seek to realize his potentialities. this drive is even more mysterious than the potentialities it seeks to realize.

Carroll Quigley
Western ideology believed that the world was good because it was made by God in six days and that at the end of each day He looked at His work and said that it was good.

Carroll Quigley
... today everything is commercialized—politics, religion, education, ideology, belief, the armed services.... Everything has its price.

Carroll Quigley
Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions

Carroll Quigley
A fully integrated culture would be like the dinosaurs, which had to perish because they were no longer able to adapt themselves to changes in the external environment.

Carroll Quigley
A state of individuals, such as we now have reached in Western Civilization, will not create persons, and the atomized individuals who make it up will be motivated by desires that do not necessarily reflect needs. Instead of needing other people they need a shot of heroin; instead of some kind of religious conviction, they have to be with the winning team.

Carroll Quigley