Carroll Quigley Quotes

In the East [Russia] the state was everything. Civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the West there was a proper relationship between the state and civil society.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

Rwanda is a democracy not a monarchy.

We have two distinct types of political organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore when we include both types under a general term like government, we get into logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve.

In some dim beginning, man created the institution of government as a convenience for himself. And, ever since that time, government has been doing its best to become an inconvenience.

No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States.

To form a new Government, requires infinite care, and unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid the superstructure must be bad.

It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government.

...a state is not the same thing as a society ... A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.

The ordered organization of coercion we call the State.

This is a country that historically has had very little central government.

The Constitution has to be supreme.

Audacity, hope, courage - the Libyans have these in abundance. But all those boring little things - like organization, building a committee - is hard; making decisions and moving ahead is hard.

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.

Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.

Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.

The federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.

It actually turns out to be much harder to really understand government across state local and federal.

Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.

What is this thing we call government? Is it anything but organized violence? The law orders you to obey, and if you don't obey, it will compel you by force - all governments, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or fear of punishment.

The state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.

Few consider how much we are indebted to government, because few can represent how wretched mankind would be without it.

"Government," says Swift, "is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads."

The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated.

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state, especially of the highest of all. The government is everywhere sovereign in the state, and the constitution is in fact the government.