Carroll Quigley - Society Quotes

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... 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
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
... in our society... this has now become a propagandist system in which emphasis is put on the future... the ideology against which the young people of the 1950's and 1960's rebelled. Future preference: plan; study hard; save.

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

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
... I offended some of you by saying you had been brainwashed. This is not an insult; it's a simple statement of fact. When any infant is born and socialized in a society, even if he is to become a very mature individual, he has been brainwashed.... given a structure for categorizing his experience and a system of values applied to the structure of categories.

Carroll Quigley
... when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries you have... a misplacement of satisfactions. You find your emotional satisfaction in making a lot of money... or in proving to the poor, half-naked people in Southeast Asia that you can kill them in large numbers.

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
... the nineteenth century Age of Expansion... brought on an acceleration of the main focus of the activities of society... from the areas of internal controls to the areas of external controls.... the increasing role of propaganda... helped create an impression of stability.

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
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
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
Each individual in a society is a nexus where innumerable relationships of this character intersect.

Carroll Quigley
The difference between a stable society and an unstable one is that the restraints in an unstable one are external. In a stable society government ultimately becomes unnecessary; the restraints on people's actions are internal, they're self-disciplined...

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