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.

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

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

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse.

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.

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.

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.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.

All civilizations must go through four stages: The first stage is the emergence of a new civilization and society. The second stage covers a period of growth and prosperity. Stagnation and decadence characterize the third stage where wealth can no longer increase. This brings us to a fourth stage of decline leading to the ultimate collapse. Finally, a new civilization emerges from the ashes of the previous one and another cycle is born. The conditions of the world, and of the nations do not persist in one unchanging state but are transformed with the passage of time and move from one condition to another

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.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

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.

I think culture is a very challenging thing to reverse.

We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.

I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.

When you study history and look at every civilization that has grown up and died off, they all leave one remnant: a major sports colosseum at the heart of their capital. Our fate can be different; but only if we start doing things differently.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.