Rudolph Rummel quotes

Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression. (Rudolph Rummel)
We have a solution for war. It is to expand the sphere of liberty. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking Power, i. e., through fostering democratic freedom. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
I conclude that nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
The less democratic a country is, the move intense its foreign violence. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
It should be underlined that while the democratic or state socialist believes that socialist governments will be peaceloving and nonviolent, the Marxist-Leninist believes this true of only the final, communist stage of stateless anarchy. The socialist transition period may well involve war with capitalist states, but while this inter-state war is to be avoided if at all possible in this age of nuclear weapons, the world-wide struggle against capitalism must be pursued by all means short of inter-state war. This would involve not only the arts of deception, disinformation, subversion, and demoralization, against capitalist states, but also terrorism and domestic wars through ‘national liberation fronts'. For the Marxist-Leninist, then, it is the communist system that is inherently peaceful, not the socialist intermediary state. This socialist stage means the purposeful, aggressive use of force and violence to pursue the final, global stage of communist peace and freedom. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
In the twentieth century, governments murdered, as a prudent estimate, 272,000,000 men, women and children. It could be over 400,000,000. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
In total, communist (Marxist-Leninist) regimes murdered nearly 148 million people from 1917 to 1987. For a perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the twentieth century killed in combat around 41 million. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
The citizens of democracies are the least likely to be murdered by their own government; the citizens of totalitarian, especially Marxist systems, the most likely. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
The more libertarian a state, the significantly less internal violence it has, and the significantly and predictably (in variance terms) lower its possible peak violence. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
The more people are free, the greater their human development and national wealth. In short, freedom is the way to economic and social human security. (Rudolph Rummel)
In sum, theoretical and empirical research establishes that democratic civil liberties and political rights promote nonviolence and is a path to a warless world. The clearest evidence of this is that there has never been a war between well-established democracies, while numerous wars have occurred between all other political systems;... View quote
Rudolph Rummel
The less freedom people have the more violence, the more freedom the less violence. I put this here as the Power Principle: power kills, absolute power kills absolutely. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
Socialism aside, there also has been a rejection of Western values, of which individual freedom is prominent, and acceptance of some form of value-relativism (thus, no political system is better than any other). In some cases this rejection has turned to outright hostility and particularly anti-Americanism, and thus opposition to American values, such as freedom. To accept, therefore, that democratic freedom is inherently most peaceful, is to the value-relativist, to say the unacceptable-that it is better. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
It is sad that hundreds of thousands of people can be killed by governments with hardly an international murmur, while a war killing several thousand people can cause an immediate world outcry and global reaction. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
There is a good reason that all of this killing is unknown. The authoritarian and totalitarian thug regimes that do most of the killing usually control who writes their histories and what appears in them. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
Killing that is explicitly permitted is not democide. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
Since advancing freedom of the press furthers democracy, spreading freedom of the press promotes world peace. And the reverse logic is also true. Without democracies, there will be war; without freedom of the press, democracies cannot exist. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
The evidence on this question is persuasive: the best way of eliminating war between nations, of minimizing domestic political violence, and of virtually making genocide and mass murder a horror of the past, is by fostering political freedom. Politically free nations do not make war on each other, have minimum domestic political violence, and virtually no genocide and mass murder. I call this the miracle that is freedom. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence and an antidote to war. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
Most of the world's people have been robbed of their freedom by tyrants... In the last century alone, 272,000,000 were shot, burned, stabbed, tortured, beaten, starved to death, blasted to death, buried alive, or whatever other ways of murdering their slaves these thugs could imagine. This horrific and evil toll of bodies could head-to-toe circle the earth more than ten times. It is as though a catastrophic nuclear war had happened, but its mountain of deaths spread over each day of the last century. (Rudolph Rummel)
In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
Quite simply, a free press promotes peace; creating a universally free press would promote universal peace. The bridge between the two is democracy. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
Democracy is a metasolution to the problem of diversity. View quote
Rudolph Rummel
Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and this book on genocide and government mass murder-what I call democide-in this century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. View quote
Rudolph Rummel