Carroll Quigley: Humanity

Carroll Quigley was American historian. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.
Carroll Quigley: 158 quotes0 likes

“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

“…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)

“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)

“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

“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)

“…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)

“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)

“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)

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

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

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

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

“The range of human potentialities is also the range of human needs because of man's vital drive that impels him to seek to realize his potentialities. this drive is even more mysterious than the potentialities it seeks to realize.”

Carroll Quigley

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 2, Man and Culture, p. 55

“…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.”

Carroll Quigley

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