Success Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s sentence carries the cool authority of a civilizational scorecard, but its real work is ideological triage: deciding what counts as “failure,” and for whom. Framed as a matter-of-fact diagnosis, it smuggles in a hierarchy of cultures where Christianity is the default metric of success and “Arab outlooks” function as the explanatory contaminant. The verb choice matters. “Spread” and “influence” suggest a kind of seepage, an external force diluting an otherwise natural Western trajectory. It’s a familiar mid-century historical move: treat religion not as a contested, local practice but as a bloc competing for territory, prestige, and institutional permanence.

The geographic phrasing is also telling. “West from Sicily” reads like a civilizational fault line, casting the Mediterranean not as a shared world but as a border where the “right” tradition either holds or collapses. Spain becomes the clinching exhibit, evoking al-Andalus without naming its complexities: political fragmentation, shifting alliances, conversion, coexistence, and periodic violence. By flattening that entangled history into “Christianity failed because Arabs influenced,” Quigley implies a zero-sum contest where cultural exchange is inherently subtractive.

Contextually, Quigley wrote in an era when “Western civilization” narratives were being systematized for Cold War audiences: coherent, inheritable, defensible. The subtext is a warning about permeability. Read now, the line reveals less about medieval Spain than about a modern desire to make history police the borders of identity.