Carroll Quigley Quotes

Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.

If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

It's not surprising, therefore, that the [Bisy] Backson thinks of progress in terms of fighting and overcoming. One of his little idiosyncrasies, you might say. Of course, real progress involves growing and developing, which involves changing inside, but that's something the inflexible Backson is unwilling to do.

The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.

I'm not too worried about humanity in the future. I think we've got an innate ability as a species to self-correct.

There is no such thing as getting anything easy. Trust and believe. Even if you're good at what you do, you still should be practicing, you still should be updating, especially. Because if you don't update, you become a dinosaur.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.

The culture that's going to survive in the future is the culture that you can carry around in your head.

Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.

Much bending breaks the bow; much unbending the mind.

Tradition, if not constantly recreated, can be as much a millstone as a mill-wheel.

[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.

We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.

Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

The proposition that the meek (that is the adaptable and serviceable), inherit the earth is not merely a wishful sentiment of religion, but an iron law of evolution.

It is a bad plan that cannot be altered.

Persistence in a single view has never been regarded as a merit in political leaders.

The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.

The penalty for a long life is increasing resistance to change.

I think something happens with age. And I find this really a lot in what I read from certain art critics: For people who are all about change-people who are supposed to be intellectually and culturally drawn to the idea of change and how the voice of a creative person affects the world on a bigger scale than just the canvas-I would expect a person in that position to have that open mind. It's only a sign of age that they become so locked in their own rules that they forget that this is what it's all about.

You think I live in the past. You don't understand that I actually change with every era, I always have as best I can

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

As an outsider myself, I always mixed myself with different groups...I've never been afraid to go into a different space and relate to those people, because I don't have a place where I belong and that means I belong everywhere.