Carroll Quigley Quotes (79 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Famous Carroll Quigley Quotes

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

Carroll Quigley

Preface to the First Edition, p. 23
The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979)

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 1, Scientific Method and the Social Sciences, p. 40

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 8, Canaanite and Minooan Civilizations, p. 240

Carroll Quigley Quotes about people

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“The final result will be that the American people will ultimately prefer communities. They will cop out or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life--although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of copping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large scale basis. …People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what’s going on in the world, and by increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in their own neighborhoods.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 7, Mesopotamian Civilization, p. 213

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

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“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…”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Conclusion, p. 420
The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979)

Carroll Quigley: Trending 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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Religion , Idea , Science

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

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

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Carroll Quigley Quotes

“Another aspect of the nineteenth century propaganda system is the increasing emphasis upon material desires.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“The brainwashing which has been going on for 150 years has also resulted in the replacement of intellectual activities and religion by ideologies and science. …I have nothing against Marx, except that his theories do not explain what happened.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Religion , Science

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

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

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

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Communication , Personality

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 8, Canaanite and Minooan Civilizations, p. 266

“…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…”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Feeling , Understanding

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

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Education , Religion

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Religion , Food , Communication , Failure

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 405

Problem

“The fundamentalist position on biblical interpretation, with its emphasis on the explicit, complete, final, and authoritarian nature of Scripture, is a very late, minority view quite out of step with the Western tradition.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 342

Nature

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

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 4, Historical Analysis, p. 122

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 8, Canaanite and Minooan Civilizations, p. 241

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Communication

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 9, Classical Civilization, p. 318

War

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

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“It is also in theory, conceivable that some universal empire some day might cover the whole globe, leaving no external "barbarians" to serve as invaders.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 5, Historical Change in Civilizations, p. 163

Universe

“[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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Wealth

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 333-334

Change , Parting

“Another thing that they have tried to get us to believe in the last 150 years… is that the nation as the repository of sovereignty can be both a state and a community. …Why did the English, the French, the Castilians, the Hohenzollerns, and others become the repository of sovereignty as nations… They did so because… weapons made it possible to compel obedience over areas which were approximately the size of these national groups… nationalism is an episode in history, and it fit a certain power structure and a certain configuration in human life in our civilization. Now… They all want autonomy. …The nation or the state, as we now have it as the structure of power, cannot be a community.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Life , History , Communication

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

History , Happiness

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Nature

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

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 1, Scientific Method and the Social Sciences, p. 40

Science

“A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 3, Groups, Societies, and Civilizations, p. 71

“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…”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Suicide

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Family , Communication

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

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 5, Historical Change in Civilizations, p. 137

Way

“These seven stages we shall name as follows:
1. Mixture
2. Gestation
3. Expansion
4. Age of Conflict
5. Universal Empire
6. Decay
7. Invasion”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 5, Historical Change in Civilizations, p. 146

Age , Universe

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

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 9, Classical Civilization, p. 270

“No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 1, Scientific Method and the Social Sciences, p. 34

Truth

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), p. 1278

Men , Problem

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 4, Historical Analysis, p. 85

Change , Time

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 2, Man and Culture, p. 63

Change

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

History , Freedom , Reading

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Age , Help

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

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 3, Groups, Societies, and Civilizations, p. 67

Behavior , Science , Personality

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), p. 1227

Universe , Parting , Patience

“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”

Carroll Quigley

the uninvested surplus
Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 5, Historical Change in Civilizations, p. 152

War

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Communication , Nature

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 5, Historical Change in Civilizations, p. 127

Change

“The fundamental, all-pervasive cause of world instability is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neuroses and psychoses. The technological acceleration of transportation, communication and weapons systems is now creating power areas wider than existing political structures.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

World , Communication

“After years of work in both areas of study, I concluded that the social sciences were different, in many important ways, from the natural sciences, but that the same scientific methods were applicable in both areas, and, indeed, that no very useful work could be done in either area except by scientific methods.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 1, Scientific Method and the Social Sciences, p. 33

Way , Nature , Study , Science

“Western ideology believed that the world was good because it was made by God in six days and that at the end of each day He looked at His work and said that it was good.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 337

God , World

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Conclusion, p. 415
The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979)

Understanding , Memory , Time , Training

“When Rome fell, the Christian answer was, "Create our own communities."”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Communication

“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.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 4, Historical Analysis, p. 123

“…another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital.”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

World

“When these extremists argued for "either-or," the Western tradition answered "both!"”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 345

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

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“…they give us vicarious satisfactions for many of our frustrations. …People need exercise; they do not need to watch other people exercise… Another vicarious satisfaction is sexy magazines; this is vicarious sex. To anyone rushing to buy one, I'd like to say, "The real thing is better."”

Carroll Quigley

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

People , Sex , Exercises

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