16 Quotes by Robert Conquest

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

Seven Ages: first puking and mewlingThen very pissed-off with your schoolingThen fucks, and then fightsNext judging chaps' rightsThen sitting in slippers: then drooling.

The psychosphere, the logosphere, is permeated by concepts, ideas, verbalizations, a whole apparatus devised, or rather evolved, to form some sort of mental contact with reality--or to block it off. That is, a large circle of the "thinking," "educated" class take ideas as more veridical than facts.

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.

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.

There was an old bastard named LeninWho did two or three million men in.That's a lot to have done inBut where he did one inThat old bastard Stalin did ten in.

Such work as is overtly political has usually been the result of neither experience nor insight, those essentials to any true creation, but rather of the frigid projection on to unsuitable material of opinions learnt in the abstract, ideologies accepted on trust.

I think once you accept that you have the answer to everything, you can do anything to bring it about because your enemies are trying to stop you, are enemies of reason, of truth of everything - enemies of the future. You represent the people, you represent the nation, you represent everything that is good and that entitles you to destroy the bad people.

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.