Carroll Quigley quotes

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 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
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
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 basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.
Carroll Quigley
No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.
Carroll Quigley
Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.
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
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 backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels.
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
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
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)
The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.
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
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
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