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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.

Carroll Quigley

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Carroll Quigley
Age: 66 †
Born: 1910
Born: November 9
Died: 1977
Died: January 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Professor
Boston
Massachusetts
Right
Argument
Policies
Perhaps
Academic
Policy
Acceptable
Party
Represent
Idea
Parties
Left
Opposed
Doctrinaire
Two
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Thinkers
Ideas
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More quotes by Carroll Quigley

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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 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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Each central banksought 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 cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.
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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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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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When goods are exchanged between countries, they must be paid for by commodities or gold. They cannot be paid for by the notes, certificates, and checks of the purchaser's country, since these are of value only in the country of issue.
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When the business interests... pushed through the first installment of civil service reform in 1883, they expected that they would be able to control both political parties equally.
Carroll Quigley
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This persistence as private firms continued because it ensured the maximum of anonymity and secrecy to persons of tremendous public power who dreaded public knowledge of their activities as an evil almost as great as inflation.
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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 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
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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
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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
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Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.
Carroll Quigley
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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
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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
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There were people who said the Society of Cincinnati in the American revolution, of which George Washington was one of the shining lights, was a branch of the Illuminati.
Carroll Quigley
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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.
Carroll Quigley
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Each individual in a society is a nexus where innumerable relationships of this character intersect.
Carroll Quigley
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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
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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