Carroll Quigley Quotes
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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.
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The backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels.
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The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.
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The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.
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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.
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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.
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I am now quite sure that Tragedy and Hope was suppressed although I do not know why or by whom
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The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training.
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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.
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The powers of financial capitalism had a 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 meetings and conferences.
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There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret record.
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The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.
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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.
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Inflation, especially a slow steady rise in prices, encourages producers, because it means that they can commit themselves to costs of production on one price level and then, later, offer the finished product for sale at a somewhat higher price level. This situation encourages production because it gives confidence of an almost certain profit margin.
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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. 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.
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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.
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Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.
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The failure of Christianity in the areas west from Sicily was even greater, and was increased by the spread of Arab outlooks and influence to that area, and especially to Spain.
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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.
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In addition to their power over government based on government financing and personal influence, bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other pressures.
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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.
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Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs.
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Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions
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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.