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Carroll Quigley

79 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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Closely related to the erroneous idea that science is a body of knowledge is the equally erroneous idea that scientific theories are true.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each individual in a society is a nexus where innumerable relationships of this character intersect.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every civilization must be organized in such a way that it has invention, capital accumulation, and investment.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 ( the uninvested surplus).”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No culture has ever exceeded Western civilization in power and extent. Our society now covers more than half of the globe, extending in space from Poland to the east of Australia i n the west. In the course of this expansion, most of it during the last five centuries, the power of Western civilization has been so great that it has destroyed, almost without thinking of it, hundreds of other societies, including five or six other civilizations.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When these extremists argued for "either-or," the Western tradition answered "both!”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the chief reasons for the widespread fear of the Huns rested on their ability to travel very long distances in relatively short periods. This ability may well have been based on their use of horseshoes.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) first seen 1227 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 1227
“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 (1910–1977) first seen 1278 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 1278
“...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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men have social needs. They have a need for other people; they have a need to love and be loved.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularized religions like Marxism.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...empires and civilizations do not collapse because of deficiencies on the military or the political levels.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Persons, personalities if you wish, can only be made in communities.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source