Carroll Quigley Quotes

...in our society... this has now become a propagandist system in which emphasis is put on the future... the ideology against which the young people of the 1950's and 1960's rebelled. Future preference: plan; study hard; save.

...I offended some of you by saying you had been brainwashed. This is not an insult; it's a simple statement of fact. When any infant is born and socialized in a society, even if he is to become a very mature individual, he has been brainwashed. ...given a structure for categorizing his experience and a system of values applied to the structure of categories.

...the nineteenth century Age of Expansion... brought on an acceleration of the main focus of the activities of society... from the areas of internal controls to the areas of external controls. ...the increasing role of propaganda... helped create an impression of stability.

...1776 is a very significant year. and this is not just because the American Revolution began. Watt's patent of the steam engine... Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations... the failure of the French to reorganize their political system occurred in 1776, and so forth. ...The destruction of communities, the destruction of religion and the frustration of emotions were greatly intensified by the Industrial Revolution: railroads, factories, growth of cities, technological revolution in the countryside and in the growing of food and so forth.

In its final stages the civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals.

...controls on behavior shift from the intermediate levels of human experience (social, emotional and religious) to the lower (military and political) or to the upper (ideological). They become the externalized controls of a mature society: weapons, bureaucracies, material rewards, or ideology.

...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.

[Increasing] politicization means the [economic] expansion is slowing up and you are no longer attempting to achieve increased output per capita, or increased wealth, or increased satisfactions... but you are doing so by mobilizing power. We have seen this going on for almost a century. ...increased militarization.

...today everything is commercialized--politics, religion, education, ideology, belief, the armed services. ...Everything has its price.

...Western Civilization began to expand in 976. ...The economic expansion was achieved chiefly by specialization and exchange... commercialization.

...in the last thousand years. If we go back before [AD] 976... the main core of people's life and experience... was in the religious, emotional and social levels. They had religious beliefs, they had social and emotional relationships with people they saw every day. ...controls and rewards were internalized. ...This is why they could get along without a state in 976: all the significant controls were internalized.

...when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries you have... a misplacement of satisfactions. You find your emotional satisfaction in making a lot of money... or in proving to the poor, half-naked people in Southeast Asia that you can kill them in large numbers.

...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.

A state of individuals, such as we now have reached in Western Civilization, will not create persons, and the atomized individuals who make it up will be motivated by desires that do not necessarily reflect needs. Instead of needing other people they need a shot of heroin; instead of some kind of religious conviction, they have to be with the winning team.

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.