Carroll Quigley Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions

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.

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. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.