Carroll Quigley - Social Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Carroll Quigley
... controls on behavior shift from the intermediate levels of human experience (social, emotional and religious) to the lower (military and political) or to the upper (ideological). They become the externalized controls of a mature society: weapons, bureaucracies, material rewards, or ideology.

Carroll Quigley
After years of work in both areas of study, I concluded that the social sciences were different, in many important ways, from the natural sciences, but that the same scientific methods were applicable in both areas, and, indeed, that no very useful work could be done in either area except by scientific methods.

Carroll Quigley
... another cause of today's instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital.

Carroll Quigley
The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery.

Carroll Quigley
The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.

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

Carroll Quigley
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
Everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.

Carroll Quigley