Life & Wisdom Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s line lands with the cool certainty of someone trying to sound like he’s merely describing the weather, not sketching a conspiracy map. The key move is definitional: “this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups.” “May identify” signals scholarly caution, but it also performs authority, inviting the reader to accept a label that will do a lot of work afterward. Once you buy the identification, the rest reads like evidence.

The phrase “has no aversion” is a rhetorical tell. It’s not “agrees with” or “is allied to,” but something colder: an alleged lack of moral disgust. That framing smuggles in ethical suspicion while keeping the claim technically modest. “Cooperating with the Communists” is then positioned as the most provocative example in a grab bag (“or any other groups”), implying pragmatism so extreme it becomes unprincipled. “Frequently does so” adds a drumbeat of regularity without offering specifics, letting repetition substitute for documentation.

Context matters because Quigley wrote as an elite-minded historian of power networks, especially in Anglo-American establishment politics. In the Cold War shadow, “Communists” isn’t a neutral category; it’s a cultural accelerant. The subtext is aimed at readers primed to see leftist politics not as an ideology but as a contaminant. By portraying establishment actors as willing to work with that contaminant, he flips the expected story: the danger isn’t only radicals at the gates, but respectable managers who treat ideology as just another tool.

The intent, then, is diagnostic and insinuating at once: to depict a governing class bound by connections, comfortable crossing factional lines, and insulated enough to treat even sworn enemies as usable partners.