Carroll Quigley Quotes & Sayings

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

It is clear that every civilization undergoes a process of historical change. We can see that a civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence. — Carroll Quigley

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

I am now quite sure that Tragedy and Hope was suppressed although I do not know why or by whom — Carroll Quigley

Bolshevism presented itself as an economic threat to themselves at the same time that Nazism presented itself as a political threat to their countries. — Carroll Quigley

When the business interests ... pushed through the first installment of civil service reform in 1883, they expected that they would be able to control both political parties equally. — 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

The failure of Christianity in the areas west from Sicily was even greater, and was increased by the spread of Arab outlooks and influence to that area, and especially to Spain. — 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

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

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

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

By the winter of 1945-1946, the Russian peoples were being warned of the dangers from the West. — Carroll Quigley

In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. — 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

Capitalism might be defined, if we wish to be scientific, as a form of economic organization motivated by the pursuit of profit within a price structure. — 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

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

The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally. — Carroll Quigley

There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret record. — Carroll Quigley

On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy. — 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

I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field. — Carroll Quigley

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one. — Carroll Quigley

For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century. — Carroll Quigley

Once again the mastermind was Lionel Curtis, and the earlier Round Table Groups and Institutes of International Affairs were used as nuclei for the new network. — Carroll Quigley

We see that there are two different kinds of ... societies: (a) parasitic societies and (b) producing societies. The former are those which live from hunting, fishing, or merely gleaning. By their economic activities they do not increase, but rather decrease, the amount of wealth in the world. The second kind of societies, producing societies, live by agricultural and pastoral activities. By these activities they seek to increase the amount of wealth in the world. — Carroll Quigley

Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war. — Carroll Quigley

In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to resolve a problem. — 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

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

Instead, there were a variety of controls of which some could be influenced by bankers, some could be influenced by the government, and some could hardly be influenced by either. — Carroll Quigley

In addition to their power over government based on government financing and personal influence, bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other pressures. — Carroll Quigley

There were people who said the Society of Cincinnati in the American revolution, of which George Washington was one of the shining lights, was a branch of the Illuminati. — 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

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

Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs. — Carroll Quigley

The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline. — Carroll Quigley

The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. — Carroll Quigley

To this day the Arab influence is evident in southern Italy, northern Africa and, above all, in Spain. — Carroll Quigley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished. — Carroll Quigley

Each central banksought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. — Carroll Quigley

This persistence as private firms continued because it ensured the maximum of anonymity and secrecy to persons of tremendous public power who dreaded public knowledge of their activities as an evil almost as great as inflation. — Carroll Quigley

The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England ... [and] ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established. — 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 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

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

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. — 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

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

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

It is this power structure which the Radical Right in the United States has been attacking for years in the belief that they are attacking the Communists. — Carroll Quigley

It is also in theory, conceivable that some universal empire some day might cover the whole globe, leaving no external "barbarians" to serve as invaders. — Carroll Quigley

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