Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Conquest

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.

Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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