Carroll Quigley Quotes

It is one of the issues that will have to be worked through however let me make the point and I think anyone would accept that if you set it up properly, not only will you get better environmental outcomes, you have a chance to create more wealth with the available resource.

You cannot blame the mismanagement of the economy or the fact that we have not invested adequately in education in order to give our people the knowledge, the skills and the technology that they need in order to be able to use the resources that Africa has to gain wealth.

This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.

I am keenly aware that the wealth and power of the European nations are the result not only of their having ships and powerful guns, strong fortresses and formidable troops but also because their people can fully employ their talents, their land can be fully utilized, their natural resources can be fully tapped, and their goods can freely flow.

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.

There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.

Capitalism’s success undermines the virtues (thrift, industriousness, deferral of gratification) that are prerequisites for its continuing success. Socialism’s cultural contradiction is that it is parasitic on capitalism, which must produce the wealth that socialism redistributes — until the engine of wealth creation, battered by socialism’s redistributive agenda, sputters.

I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.

The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers, was the United States of America.

America has a tremendous advantage. We have more natural resources under our feet than any other country. That's a pretty big statement. We're blessed. I don't want to give it up. I don't want to say oh, okay, we won't use it.

[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources.

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.

For example, they have land. The government of Qatar wants to lease the Tana River delta, which is in Kenya, from the Kenyan government, so that they can produce food there. People in Kenya need food. We have people who have studied agriculture. Why is it that if we really need food, we cannot go into the delta and develop our own food?

The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism-money.

Our own economy tells us to take as much as we can get, right? Our own economy says, you're going to be the most successful graduate if you go into the business world and take as much you can get. That's not how nature works. Nature has a much simpler economy. Everything in nature takes what it needs. That's it. You don't see an oak tree gathering up all the resources. An oak tree takes what it needs to be the authentic oak tree it is.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace.

Wealth comes from industry and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity.

Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.

God gives you the resources for success. But it is up to you to recognize them and use them to their fullest.

What we do with the things we have makes the biggest difference in the quality of life

All resources are not obvious; great managers find and develop available talent.

There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will.

owning capital is not a productive activity.

It is to labor, and to labor only, that man owes everything possessed of exchangeable value. Labor is the talisman that has raised him from the condition of the savage: that has changed the desert and the forest into cultivated fields; that has covered the earth with cities, and the ocean with ships; that has given us plenty, comfort, and elegance, instead of want, misery, and barbarism.

It is production that creates purchasing power, not the printing press!