Education Quote by Carroll Quigley

The line distills Carroll Quigleys larger thesis that modern financial power operates through private institutions while exercising public authority. The persistence of private corporate forms around central banking, international finance, and policy groups was not accidental or purely efficient; it was a political technology. By keeping decisions in entities chartered as private firms, those with the greatest influence could coordinate monetary policy, war finance, and crisis management with minimal exposure to electoral pressures, parliamentary inquiry, or press scrutiny.

The phrase about public knowledge being an evil almost as great as inflation is telling. For financiers and central bankers, inflation ranks as a cardinal sin because it erodes savings, unsettles contracts, and undermines creditor power. Quigley suggests that publicity ranked nearly as high on their list of dangers, since transparency would invite contestation, regulation, and accountability. The value system is revealed in the pairing: price stability is the economic priority, secrecy the political shield that preserves discretion to pursue it on their terms.

Historically, Quigley had in mind institutions such as the pre-1946 Bank of England, the Federal Reserve System with its regional banks and private governance elements, and the Bank for International Settlements, which coordinated central bankers across borders. Their private or quasi-private status enabled cartel-like cooperation through gentlemen’s agreements rather than statutes, making policy durable beyond the reach of short-term democratic moods. Foundations, law firms, and banking houses provided additional layers of deniability and technical complexity that kept the public at bay.

Quigley did not caricature these actors as merely conspiratorial; he argued they sought stability and continuity in a volatile world. But he faulted the secrecy that insulated them from public reason. The sentence captures a paradox of modern governance: persons wielding tremendous public power try to avoid being politically public, using the private form not to limit power but to hide it. The democratic problem is not only what decisions are made, but who gets to see and challenge the making of them.