Quotes from 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 mewling Then very pissed-off with your schooling Then fucks, and then fights Next judging chaps' rights Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

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.

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

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

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