Carroll Quigley quotes - page 2

The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery. (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. View quote
Carroll Quigley
A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders. View quote
Carroll Quigley
This book is not a history. Rather it is an attempt to establish analytical tools that will assist the understanding of history. View quote
Carroll Quigley
The range of human potentialities is also the range of human needs because of man's vital drive that impels him to seek to realize his potentialities. this drive is even more mysterious than the potentialities it seeks to realize. View quote
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. View quote
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... View quote
Carroll Quigley
...empires and civilizations do not collapse because of deficiencies on the military or the political levels. View quote
Carroll Quigley
The vested interests encourage the growth of imperialist wars and irrationality because both serve to divert the discontent of the masses away from their vested interests. View quote
Carroll Quigley
The economic and technological achievements of industrialization in this period were fundamentally mistaken. ...based upon plundering the natural capital of the globe that was created over millions of years: the plundering of the soils and their fertility; the plundering of human communities whether they were our own or someone else's. View quote
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)
...we no longer have intellectually satisfying arrangements in our educational system, in our arts, humanities or anything else; instead we have slogans and ideologies. An ideology is a religious or emotional expression; it is not an intellectual expression. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
Carroll Quigley
To this day the Arab influence is evident in southern Italy, northern Africa and, above all, in Spain. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Carroll Quigley