Carroll Quigley Quotes

Every civilization must be organized in such a way that it has invention, capital accumulation, and investment.

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.

Without communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized... and that occurs in the first four or five years of life. ...The first two years are important. ...of vital importance. He has to be loved, above all he has to be talked to.

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

...we were brainwashed into believing... that the only important thing was individualism. They called it freedom. There is no such thing as freedom. There is something called liberty; it's quite different. ...read [Guido de] Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism... Freedom is freedom from restraints. We're always under restraints.

We have now done what the Romans did when they started to commit suicide. We have shifted from an army of citizens to an army of mercenaries...

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.

The link between a society, whether it be made up of communities or individuals, and a state is this: Power rests on the ability to satisfy human needs.

This book is not a history. Rather it is an attempt to establish analytical tools that will assist the understanding of history

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

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.