Robert Conquest Quotes

• 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

  Hilarious, Organization, Secret

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• Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

  Robert Conquest

  History, Conquest, Subjects

  "Scourge and poet" by Andrew Brown, www.theguardian.com. February 14, 2003.

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• We still find, especially in parts of academe, the damaging notion that everything is a struggle for power, or being empowered, or hegemony, or oppression: and that all competition is a zero-sum game. This is not more than repetition of Lenin's destructive doctrine. Intellectually, it is reductionism; politically, it is fanaticism.

  Robert Conquest

  Zero, Struggle, Games

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• 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

  Commitment, Thinking, Profound

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• 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

  War, Simple, Political

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• The Idea of Anti-imperialism is... to be considered on several grounds. First, it is traditionally pervasive in the United States, though given its most extreme form in anti-Western academe. Second, it is used as a negative label for any effort by the United States, or the West, to encourage liberties, to block fanaticisms, and to make aid dependent on positive economic policies. Those concerned with the future development of their countries, and of the world, cannot afford to let obsolete resentments distort their aims.

  Robert Conquest

  Country, Block, Ideas

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• 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

  Documentaries, Proof, Made

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