Rudolph Rummel famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#Freedom #Mean #Way
Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#Political #Liberty #Earth
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.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#People #Liberty #Reason
The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#War #Government #Desire
[During the 20th century] ... 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#Children #Men #Liberty
Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#Absolute Power
Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#Government #Political #Having Fun
Our knowledge and our ability to handle our problems progress through the open conflict of ideas, through the tests of phenomenological adequacy, inner consistency, and practical-moral consequences. Reason may err, but it can be moral. If we must err, let it be on the side of our creativity, our freedom, our betterment.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#Creativity #Ideas #Consistency
To gauge the understanding and insight that metaphysics provides is to ask whether, in the final analysis, it helps us to cope with our world and harmonize our existence with nature, humanity, and ourselves, and leads to greater freedom and self-realization. Metaphysics is only the beginning. The end is human progress.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#Our World #Self #Humanity
We have a solution for war. It is to expand the sphere of liberty.
-- Rudolph Rummel

#War #Liberty #Spheres

You may also like:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Novelist
Carol S. Dweck
Professor
Edward Tufte
Statistician
Hannah Arendt
Philosopher
Henry Margenau
Physicist
Henry Ward Beecher
Minister
James Pierpont
Songwriter
Karl Jaspers
Psychiatrist
Kingsley Amis
Novelist
Lyman Beecher
Martin Heidegger
Philosopher
Michel Foucault
Philosopher
Orlando Figes
Historian
Paul Krugman
Economist
Philip Larkin
Poet
Pol Pot
Political leader
Polly Adler
Author
Robert Conquest
Historian
Robert Jay Lifton
Psychiatrist
Walter Benjamin
Literary critic