Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Carroll Quigley
Age: 66 †
Born: 1910
Born: November 9
Died: 1977
Died: January 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Professor
Boston
Massachusetts
Difference
Restraint
Becomes
Internals
Differences
Internal
Society
Unnecessary
Action
External
Government
Stable
Restraints
Self
Ultimately
Unstable
People
Actions
Disciplined

More quotes by Carroll Quigley

Image
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
Image
Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions
Carroll Quigley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.
Carroll Quigley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Each individual in a society is a nexus where innumerable relationships of this character intersect.
Carroll Quigley
Image
Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.
Carroll Quigley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Carroll Quigley
Image
The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England ... [and] ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established.
Carroll Quigley
Image
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.
Carroll Quigley
Image
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.
Carroll Quigley
Image
To this day the Arab influence is evident in southern Italy, northern Africa and, above all, in Spain.
Carroll Quigley
Image
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.
Carroll Quigley
Image
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.
Carroll Quigley