Politics & Power Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s sentence reads like a calm tour guide pointing at the wiring behind the wall: not a single master switch, but a messy control panel with levers that respond differently depending on who grabs them. The deliberate repetition of “some could be influenced” does two things at once. It concedes power to bankers and government without granting either total control, and it inoculates the speaker against the easy charge of conspiracy-mongering. He’s sketching a system, not a cabal.

The key word is “instead.” It signals an argument against a simplified story - the popular fantasy that one actor (usually “the bankers” or “the state”) runs the whole economic show. Quigley’s intent is to reframe how readers think about modern political economy: power is distributed across institutions, incentives, and feedback loops. “Controls” suggests mechanisms like interest rates, credit flows, regulatory regimes, currency arrangements, and capital markets - technical tools that shape society while remaining largely invisible to the public. By noting that some controls “could hardly be influenced by either,” he smuggles in the most unsettling point: even elite players hit constraints. Markets can punish policy; politics can distort finance; international conditions can shrug at both.

Context matters because Quigley wrote as a grand-scale historian of Western institutions, wary of cartoon villain explanations and interested in the architecture of power. The subtext is almost contemporary: if you’re looking for a single culprit, you’re already misunderstanding the machine. The real story is governance by interlocking systems, where responsibility is diluted, accountability is slippery, and outcomes can feel intentional even when they’re emergent.