Carroll Quigley Quotes

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.

All societies are historical.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

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.

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.

I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

It is nonsense to say that Germans are unable to change.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

Let the good ideas seep in, turning the barbarians [Khmer] into civilized people. As for winning the hearts of the people, and teaching them, we plan to do this rather slowly.

Tradition, by its very nature, includes continuous change.

History is the record of human society or world civilization, of the changes that take place in the nature of that society … of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.

The Chinese move very slowly. Our customs are so fixed that it takes much time to change them.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.