Carroll Quigley Quotes

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.

Persons, personalities if you wish, can only be made in communities.

...empires and civilizations do not collapse because of deficiencies on the military or the political levels.

When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularized religions like Marxism.

...human beings have religious needs. They have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully understand, and with humility, they admit they do not understand...

Our society has so cluttered our lives with artifacts [man-made things]... and organizational structures that [our] moment to moment relationships with nature are almost impossible.

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

Men have social needs. They have a need for other people; they have a need to love and be loved.

...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.

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.

...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.

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 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.

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.

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.