Life & Wisdom Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley slips a quiet grenade into a sentence that sounds like catechism. By calling this the "traditional Christian attitude", he’s not praising Christianity so much as recruiting it for a broader argument about how societies justify their power. The line reverses what many modern readers assume Christianity teaches (original sin as default corruption) and instead foregrounds an older, more institution-friendly premise: people are basically workable. If human nature is "essentially good", then moral failure can be framed less as destiny and more as miseducation, bad environment, or flawed institutions. That’s a worldview with administrative consequences.

The key phrase is "formed and modified by social pressures and training". Quigley is pointing to a malleable self, the kind that can be shaped by family, church, school, and state. The subtext is double-edged. On one hand, it’s optimistic: reform is possible, character can be cultivated, and society has obligations. On the other, it’s a blueprint for soft control. If personality is plastic, then whoever designs the "training" gets to define virtue, normalcy, and belonging.

Context matters because Quigley writes as a grand historian of systems, not a devotional thinker. He’s tracing intellectual inheritances that underwrite modern social policy: rehabilitation over retribution, education as moral technology, culture as governance. The sentence works because it reads like neutral description while smuggling in an argument about power: the battle over human nature isn’t theological trivia. It’s a fight over whether people should be managed, punished, or nurtured - and who gets to do the managing.