Robert Conquest Quotes

#1. In a jungle full of totalitarian monsters liberal democracy needs teeth.

Robert Conquest

#2. There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

Robert Conquest

#3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

Robert Conquest

#4. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

Robert Conquest

#5. To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.

Robert Conquest

#6. Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

Robert Conquest

#7. You made a point about proof. In this sort of history we do nt have proof ... Yet ... the incontrovertibility of the evidence can be plain even when it is not documentary or complete.

Robert Conquest

#8. The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of that Cold War.

Robert Conquest

#9. Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

Robert Conquest

#10. Anthony Howard, then editor of the left-wing New Statesman, once pointed out that if Huey Long had only used left-wing phraseology he would have enjoyed wide support from the New York and London intelligentsia.

Robert Conquest