Education Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s sentence doesn’t just accuse; it anatomizes a governing instinct: power prefers the dark, not because it’s inherently criminal, but because exposure is a cost. The phrasing is bureaucratic on purpose. “Persistence” and “private firms” sound like dry institutional description, yet they smuggle in a political thriller’s premise: the machinery of public life is being routed through structures designed to evade public sightlines.

The key move is his inversion of what’s supposed to be normal. In a democracy, the public expects transparency and treats secrecy as an exception. Quigley flips it: secrecy becomes the functional requirement of “persons of tremendous public power.” The sentence doesn’t moralize with obvious villain language; it builds a colder claim that anonymity is an operational advantage, like liquidity or leverage. “Ensured the maximum” reads like a design spec. This is not accidental opacity; it’s engineered.

His most revealing phrase is “dreaded public knowledge… almost as great as inflation.” That comparison drags the argument out of ethics and into political economy. Inflation is the classic mass-level legitimacy crisis: it makes everyone feel the system is lying about value. Quigley suggests public knowledge can trigger a similar crisis for elites, exposing not just decisions but networks, conflicts of interest, and the gap between stated purpose and real intent.

Context matters: Quigley wrote in the mid-century shadow of central banking, corporate consolidation, and Cold War national-security secrecy. “Private firms” here signals the hybrid zone where state authority, finance, and expertise mingle - a place accountability goes to die while influence stays perfectly alive.