Carroll Quigley Quotes

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies... is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.

Talk comes from ideology but action comes from outlook.

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

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.

It might be pleasant just to give up, live in the present, enjoying existential personal experiences, living like lotus-eaters from our amazing productive system, without personal responsibility, self-discipline, or thought about the future. But this is impossible, because the productive system could itself collapse, and our external enemies would soon destroy us.

What has most disturbed Carroll Quigley is the deterioration that has occurred in college education. While universities have produced an ever increasing number of specialists, technicians, scholars, and researchers in a wide variety of fields, institutions of higher education have been affected by a philosophical myopia. This has caused a serious erosion of the highest ideals associated with intellectual pursuits and professionalism. Throughout his life, Dr. Quigley has fought against this trend. A chair in Carroll Quigley’s name will stand for quality education for as long as it is endowed.

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.” Carroll Quigley

For example, I’ve talked about the lower middle class as the backbone of fascism in the future. I think this may happen. The party members of the Nazi Party in Germany were consistently lower middle class. I think that the right-wing movements in this country are pretty generally in this group.

We are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff because we have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world. We are living in a very dangerous age in which insatiably greedy men are prepared to sacrifice anybody’s health and tranquility to satisfy their own insatiable greed for money and power. I am aghast at what selfishness, and the drive for power have done to our society. I worry as I find the world so increasingly horrible that I do not see how anything as wonderful as your life can escape. The best thing you can do is to keep some enclaves of satisfying decent life. I am fed up with everything but God and nature and human beings (whom I love and pity, as I always did). I feel glad I am a Christian, glad that I am without allegiance to any bloc, party, or groups, except to our Judeo-Christian tradition (modified by science and common sense). God keep you all and help you to grow.

this book is almost inexcusably lengthy. For this I must apologize, with the excuse that I did not have time to make it shorter

It might be pleasant just to give up, live in the present, enjoying existential personal experiences, living like lotus-eaters from our amazing productive system, without personal responsibility, self-discipline, or thought about the future. But this is impossible, because the productive system could itself collapse, and our external enemies would soon destroy us. Tragedy & Hope p. 1275

I feel glad I am a Christian, glad I am without allegiance to any bloc, party, or groups, except to our Judeo-Christian tradition (modified by science and common sense). God keep you all and cause you to grow.

The key to Carroll Quigley’s success as a teacher and as a scholar lies in his creative intellect, the depth of his perceptions, and the wide interdisciplinary range of this interests, which encompasses the fields of history, economics, philosophy, and science. An iconoclast and a person of insatiable curiosity, as well as keenness of mind, Dr. Quigley stands apart from the specialized scholar who plows diligently in the rutted grooves of narrow disciplines.

But Quigley’s interdisciplinary interests resulted not from dilletantism, but from a distrust of reductionism as a means of understanding society and an insatiable curiosity he synthesized into a revolutionary holistic epistemology.

don’t think you can have any society without self-discipline, individual responsibility, some kind of property that you can call your own, some basis for identity, some system of moral values. Only emotional people cry, “Down with the middle classes,” or any other class. I think that we can design a better society, and we still have about the best society that’s around. The fact that we are discontented with its imperfections is not a bad thing in itself, but it is no justification to destroy it. And if we are to have a society in the future which is strong and healthy and stable, it will be based to a very considerable extent on the virtues that you’re talking about. But it cannot be based upon a rigid loyalty to structures.

We might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be solely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this. Tragedy & Hope, p. 1232

A civilization is the single largest unit of human organization, higher though more amorphous than even an empire. Civilizations are partly a practical response by human populations to their environments – the challenges of feeding, watering, sheltering and defending themselves – but they are also cultural in character; often, though not always, religious; often, though not always, communities of language. 5 They are few, but not far between. Carroll Quigley counted two dozen in the last ten millennia.

The lower middle class is petty bourgeois. These people seek their security in status; status in an organizational structure. They try to find a place for themselves in an organization which has a hierarchy in which they can count on moving up automatically simply by surviving. Some people still think that most Americans are active, assertive, aggressive, self-reliant people who need no help from anyone, especially the Government, and achieve success as individuals by competing freely with each other. That may have been true 100 years ago. It isn’t true today. Today more and more of us are petty bourgeois who snuggle down in a hierarchical bureaucracy where advancement is assured merely by keeping the body warm and not breaking the rules; it doesn’t matter whether it is education or the Armed Services or a big corporation or the Government. Notice that high school teachers are universally opposed to merit pay. They are paid on the basis of their degrees and years of teaching experience. Or consider the professor. He gets his Ph. D. by writing a large dissertation on a small subject, and he hopes to God he never meets anyone else who knows anything about that subject. If he does, they don’t talk about it; they talk about the weather or baseball. So our society is becoming more and more a society of white-collar clerks on many levels, including full professors. They live for retirement and find their security through status in structures.

For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

For the West, even as it nominally ceases to be Christian, and most obviously in those areas which have, at least nominally, drifted furthest from Christianity, still has many of the basic Christian traits of love, humility, social concern, humanitarianism, brotherly care, and future preference, however detached these traits may have become from the Christian idea of deity or of individual salvation in a spiritual eternity. T&H p. 1120

In his 1966 book, Tragedy and Hope, Professor Carroll Quigley said: [T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.1 Their scheme is close to fulfillment unless public outrage stops them. They plan global control of money, credit and debt to be able to dominate economies, politics, commerce, and military adventures, so that these might be conducted in a way that benefits them advantageously. In fact, the power to create money can build or destroy nations. In private hands, it goes to the root of today’s problems.

Westerners came in with guns, they made the native governments sign agreements not to raise their import tariff over 5 percent and in one case 8 percent. Japan didn’t get free from that tariff until the 20th century. In China and in the Ottoman Empire they didn’t get rid of it until well in the 20th century. And this 5 percent tariff made it impossible for them to keep European industrial goods out and preserve the handicraft of their own peasantry. Well, now, the transportation and communication revolution requires capital. Where are they going to get it? There is no development ahead of it which would provide it. It requires labor. Where are they going to get that? Their economic system, their agricultural system, is already producing hardly enough. Well, the way they got these skilled technologists, where they got these inventions, where they got the capital was, of course, from Europe, generally by borrowing it and building railroads and so forth. But they were not paying for it themselves.

told his students in “The World Since 1914” class that there was little point in discussing the Third World when they knew so little about how their own society works: “So I told them about the USA — really very hair-raising when it is all laid out in sequence: . . . . 1. cosmic hierarchy; 2. energy; 3. agriculture; 4. food; 5. health and medical services; 6. education; 7. income flows and the worship of GROWTH; 8. inflation. . . showing how we are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff because we. . . have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world.” 7 He feared “that the students will come to feel that all is hopeless, so I must. . . show them how solutions can be found by holistic methods seeking diversity, de-centralization, communities. . .etc.” 8 Pleased with the class response, he later recalled: “The students were very excited and my last lecture in which I put the whole picture together was about the best lecture I ever gave. That was 10 Dec. [1975], my last full day of teaching after 41 years.

There is a change underway, however. Our society used to be a ladder on which people generally climbed upward. More and more now we are going to a planetary structure, in which the great dominant lower middle class, the class that determines our prevailing values and organizational structures in education, government, and most of society, are providing recruits for the other groups — sideways, up, and even down, although the movement downward is relatively small. As the workers become increasingly petty bourgeois and as middle-class bureaucratic and organizational structures increasingly govern all aspects of our society, our society is increasingly taking on the characteristics of the lower middle class, although the poverty culture is also growing. The working class is not growing. Increasingly we are doing things with engineers sitting at consoles, rather than with workers screwing nuts on wheels. The workers are a diminishing, segment of society, contrary to Marx’s prediction that the proletariat would grow and grow. I have argued elsewhere that many people today are frustrated because we are surrounded by organizational structures and artifacts. Only the petty bourgeoisie can find security and emotional satisfaction in an organizational structure, and only a middle-class person can find them in artifacts, things that men have made, such as houses, yachts, and swimming pools. But human beings who are growing up crave sensation and experience. They want contact with other people, moment-to-moment, intimate contact. I’ve discovered, however, that the intimacy really isn’t there. Young people touch each other, often in an almost ritual way; they sleep together, eat together, have sex together. But I don’t see the intimacy. There is a lot of action, of course, but not so much more than in the old days, I believe, because now there is a great deal more talk than action. This group, the lower middle class, it seems to me, holds the key to the future. I think probably they will win out. If they do, they will resolutely defend our organizational structures and artifacts. They will cling to the automobile, for instance; they will not permit us to adopt more efficient methods of moving people around. They will defend the system very much as it is and, if necessary, they will use all the force they can command. Eventually they will stop dissent altogether, whether from the intellectuals, the religious, the poor, the people who run the foundations, the Ivy League colleges, all the rest. The colleges are already becoming bureaucratized, anyway. I can’t see the big universities or the foundations as a strong progressive force. The people who run Harvard and the Ford Foundation look more and more like lower-middle-class bureaucrats who pose no threat to the established order because they are prepared to do anything to defend the system.

Always the teacher, Quigley emphasized the study of tools of analysis to develop a useful epistemology. In epistemology he always retained his belief in the scientific method.6 Quigley’s explanation of scientific method as an analytical tool in the social sciences is original with him only in that he recognized the real limitations of the physical sciences, as opposed to the scientific extremism of Langlois and Seignobos. The scientific method Quigley subscribed to consists of gathering evidence, making a hypothesis, and testing the hypothesis. The laws arising from the use of scientific method in both the physical and social sciences are idealized theories reflecting observed phenomena only approximately, but Quigley felt laws must be based on observation and must be amended to account for any observed anomalies. After these laws were scientifically constructed, Quigley used them as conceptual paradigms to explain historical phenomena through comparison, in contrast to rationally derived laws of the theorists which will not adapt to anomalies of observation. “Theory must agree with phenomena, not vice versa.” 7 Thus, Quigley puts the historian at ease with scientific methods by explaining that physical laws have as many exceptions as the historicists claim historical laws do.

Quigley found the explanation of disintegration in the gradual transformation of social “instruments” into “institutions,” that is, the transformation of social arrangements functioning to meet real social needs into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs. In an ideologically Platonistic society, social arrangements are molded to express a rigidly idealized version of reality. Such institutionalization would not have the flexibility to accommodate to the pressures of changing reality for which the ideology has no categories of thought that will allow perception, analysis, and handling. But the extraordinary distinction of Western civilization is that its ontology allows an open-ended epistemology. It is engaged in a constant effort to understand reality which is perceived as in constant change. Therefore, our categories of knowledge are themselves always subject to change. As a consequence reform is always possible.

Yet Quigley perceives — correctly in my view — the possible termination of open-ended Western civilization. With access to an explosive technology that can tear the planet apart, coupled with the failure of Western civilization to establish any viable system of world government, local political authority will tend to become violent and absolutist. As we move into irrational activism, states will seize upon ideologies that justify absolutism. The 2,000-year separation in Western history of state and society would then end. Western people would rejoin those of the rest of the world in merging the two into a single entity, authoritarian and static. The age that we are about to enter would be an ideologic one consistent with the views of Hegel and Marx — a homeostatic condition. That triumph would end the Western experiment and return us to the experience of the rest of the world — namely, that history is a sequence of stages in the rise and fall of absolutist ideologies.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” There are no means available to measure the intellectual impact and the far-reaching effects of his influence on the minds of his students. For this reason it is impossible to give Dr. Quigley recognition commensurate with his value to thousands of Georgetown students since his arrival here from Harvard in the Fall of 1941.

Quigley’s quest for simplicity in history did not preclude his recognition of its complexity. Instead of surrendering to historical complexity as an insurmountable obstacle and retreating to an historicism that would obviate the development of paradigms, Quigley confronted complexity head-on and sought to recognize it as an integral part of historical method. He realized that while reductionism is possible with the physical sciences, any such attempt at dissecting an historical phenomena and isolating and analyzing only one factor as an independent variable is impossible in the social sciences. Thus, Quigley studied the whole context of a phenomena, a method developed by the theoretical biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy termed “general systems theory” 10 This “generalism” became known as “holisticism” and operationalized as “macrohistory.” By “holisticism”, Quigley meant that the “whole” of reality held greater meaning than the sum of its parts, thus scholars should tend towards general studies to understand general and comparative historical concepts and paradigms rather than the hyperspecialization pervading the discipline of history.11

But epistemology also played a dominant role in determining several other aspects of life. As with all of Quigley’s concepts, however, “epistemology” must be clearly defined before its role in shaping history can be understood. The operational definition Quigley gives “epistemology” is “cognitive system” that is, the ways in which “the language of a society classifies human experience in order to think or to communicate and the values which a particular society puts upon these categories, determining the most fundamental engines of human motivation.” 17 The generic morphology of a cognitive system consists of those five levels on the continuum of the fifth dimension of abstraction, that is, feelings, emotions, self-awareness, rationality, and spirituality.

I am a ‘macrohistorian’ specializing in the processes of change in advanced societies, with a special interest in methodological questions

From these studies it would seem that civilizations pass through a process of evolution which can be analyzed briefly as follows: each civilization is born in some inexplicable fashion and, after a slow start, enters a period of vigorous expansion, increasing its size and power, both internally and at the expense of its neighbors, until gradually a crisis of organization appears. When this crisis has passed and the civilization has been reorganized, it seems somewhat different. Its vigor and morale have weakened. It becomes stabilized and eventually stagnant. After a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, internal crises again arise. At this point there appears, for the first time, a moral and physical weakness which raises, also for the first time, questions about the civilization’s ability to defend itself against external enemies. Racked by internal struggles of a social and constitutional character, weakened by loss of faith in its older ideologies and by the challenge of newer ideas incompatible with its past nature, the civilization grows steadily weaker until it is submerged by outside enemies, and eventually disappears.

is this decline in the rate of expansion of a civilization which marks its passage from the Age of Expansion to the Age of Conflict. This latter is the most complex, most interesting, and most critical of all the periods of the life cycle of a civilization. It is marked by four chief characteristics: (a) it is a period of declining rate of expansion; (b) it is a period of growing tensions and class conflicts; (c) it is a period of increasingly frequent and increasingly violent imperialist wars; and (d) it is a period of growing irrationality, pessimism, superstitions, and otherworldliness. All

Of these the earliest, Sink Civilization, rose in the valley of the Yellow River after 2000 b.c, culminated in the Chin and Han empires after 200 b.c, and was largely destroyed by Ural-Altaic invaders after a.d. 400. From this Sinic Civilization, in the same way in which Classical

Stalin was like a shrewd old wolf of the north Siberian forest. Understanding nothing outside his own experience, he never forgot what happened to himself.

Goods are wealth which you have, while money is a claim on wealth which you do not have.