Carroll Quigley - Western Quotes

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

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
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
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 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
... 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
... Western Civilization began to expand in 976.... The economic expansion was achieved chiefly by specialization and exchange... commercialization.

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