Richard Pipes Quotes (46 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Property and Freedom: The Inseparable Connection,” speech at an “Evenings at FEE” event, October 2004. https://fee.org/resources/property-and-freedom-the-inseparable-connection/

“Aristotle argues, possessions enable men to rise to a higher ethical level by giving them the opportunity to be generous: ‘liberality consists in the use which is made of property’—an argument which would greatly appeal to Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s preferred regime was one founded on a middle class, with an equitable distribution of assets.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 8

“The third factor inhibiting inquiries into the influence of Bolshevism on Fascism and National Socialism was the insistence of Moscow on banishing from the vocabulary of ‘progressive’ thought the adjective ‘totalitarian’ in favor of ‘Fascist’ to describe all anti-Communist movements and regimes.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 242

“Lenin wanted power. This may sound self-evident; after all, every politician is assumed to lust for power. But deep down, Lenin’s rivals did not want it.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), p. 42

“In 1925, Goebbels and Strasser argued in the Nazi daily, Völkischer Beobachter, that only the introduction of a ‘socialist dictatorship’ could save Germany from chaos. ‘Lenin scarified Marx.’ Goebbels wrote, ‘and in return gave Russia freedom.’ Of his own Nazi Party, he wrote in 1929 that it was a party of ‘revolutionary socialists.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 260

“Given the opportunity, Mussolini would have been glad as late as 1920-21 to take under his wing the Italian Communists, for whom he felt great affinities: greater, certainly, than for democratic socialists, liberals and conservatives. Genetically, Fascism issued from the 'Bolshevik' wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 253

“The economic policies of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany resembled the ‘state socialism’ which Lenin wanted to institute in Soviet Union upon coming to power, under which private enterprise would work for the government—an idea Lenin was force to abandon under the pressure of the ‘Left Communists’.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 218

“The Empire was traditionally run by a bureaucracy and a gentry, after 1880 reinforced by a political-police organization. This political policing was a Russian invention; Russia was the first country to have two police systems, one to protect the state from its citizens, and the other to protect the citizens from each other. Subsequently, this dual structure became a fundamental feature of totalitarian states.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), p. 17

“[T]he view that anti-Communism equals Fascism remained obligatory in countries subject to Communist censorship until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost. It was prevalent also in foreign ‘progressive’ circles. Western scholars who had the temerity to link Mussolini or Hitler with Communism in any way or to depict their regimes as genuine mass movements risked verbal or other forms of harassment.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 241

“[Mussolini] was not a theoretician but a tactician, whose intellectual eclecticism, a blend of anarchism and Marxism, as well as his emphasis on violence, resembled the ideology of the Russian Socialists-Revolutionaries.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 245

“Because he did not care about his country, Lenin was prepared to promise everybody whatever they wanted without giving much thought to the future. The peasants wanted private land for their communes? Let them take it: eventually all the land will be confiscated and collectivized anyway. Until then, ‘looting the loot’ will win over, or at least neutralize, the peasantry. The workers demand to run the factories? Even though ‘workers’ control is a detestable syndico-anarchist slogan, there is no harm in granting their desires—for the time being. Once industries have been nationalized and subjected to general economic plan of production, ‘workers’ control’ will vanish of itself.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), p. 44

“Nothing contributed more to the emergence of private property in the West and the rights associated with ownership than the appearance in the late Middle Ages of urban communities.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 107

“The three totalitarian regimes differed in several respects… What joined them, however, was much more important than what separated them. First and foremost it was the common enemy: liberal democracy with its multiparty system, its respect for law and property, its ideal of peace and stability. Lenin’s, Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fulminations against ‘bourgeois democracy’ and the Social Democrats are entirely interchangeable.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 262

“A theoretical defense of private property as a feature of Natural Law, however, was not fully made until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the age of Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. But that the idea occurred to Romans is evident from Cicero’s argument that government could not interfere with private property because it had been created in order to protect it.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), pp. 12-13

“In 1925, Mussolini adopted the term [totalitarian] and assigned it a positive meaning. He defined Fascism as ‘totalitarian’ in the sense that it politicized everything ‘human’ as well as ‘spiritual’: ‘Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 243

“If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 278

“Last but not least, the factor which prevented Trotsky from succeeding Lenin was his Jewishness. Trotsky hated to be reminded that he was a Jew. Whenever anybody come to him asking him to help other Jews, he would explode in anger and insist that he was not a Jew but an ‘internationalist.’ On one occasion he said that the fate of the Jews concerned him as little as the fate of the Bulgarians.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), p. 81

“One channel for transmitting Communist models to the Nazi movement were right-wing intellectuals with a left-wing bent close to Hitler, known as the ‘National Bolsheviks.’ Their chief theoreticians, Joseph Goebbels and Otto Strasser, greatly impressed by Bolshevik successes in Russia, wanted Germany to help Soviet Russia build up her economy in return for her political support against France and England.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 259

“On the eve of its coming to power, industrial workers composed nearly one-third of the Nazi Party membership and constituted its largest occupational groups. The party adopted the Red Flag, declared May 1 a paid national holiday, and required its members to address one another as Genossen or ‘comrades.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 220

“Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did indeed allow—or, more accurately, tolerate—private property. However, it was ‘property’ in a peculiar and very restricted sense—not the virtually untrammeled private ownership of Roman law and nineteenth–century Europe, but rather conditional possession, under which the state, the owner of last resort, reserved to itself the right to interfere with and even confiscate assets which in its judgment were unsatisfactorily used.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 218

“Another advantage of Lenin’s derived from the fact that he did not care about Russia. He cared about Germany and England in the sense that, for him, as a revolutionary, they were the key countries. Russian he viewed as nothing more than a stepping-stone to global upheaval;…”

Richard Pipes

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), p. 43

“Marxism and Bolshevism, its offspring, were products of an era in European intellectual life that was obsessed with violence. No-one embraced this philosophy more enthusiastically than the Bolsheviks: ‘merciless’ violence, violence that strove for the destruction of every actual and potential opponent, was… the only way of dealing with problems.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 500

“[For the Romans] an essential element of the Law of Nature is the equality of man, specifically, equality before the law, and the principle of human rights, including the rights to property, which antedated the state, and thus are independent of it. Fifteen hundred years later these ideas would furnish the philosophical cornerstone of Western democracy.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p.12

“The purpose of totalitarian parties, for which Bolshevism provided the model, was not to become the government, but to manipulate the government from behind the scenes.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), p. 39

“From 1920 onward, [Mussolini] depicted Italy as a ‘proletarian’ nation exploited by hostile ‘plutocratic’ countries determined to deny her her rightful place under the sun. The true class struggle, according to Fascist doctrine, was the struggle between nations. Fascism strove to surmount narrow class allegiances: all classes had to subordinate their private interests to those of the nation and collaborate against the external enemy.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 219

“In Western Europe since Roman times, private property was considered sacrosanct. The principle enunciated by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca that kings rule by the will of the people became fundamental to Western civilization, together with private property, which was the main source of productive wealth.”

Richard Pipes

“Property and Freedom: The Inseparable Connection,” speech at an “Evenings at FEE” event, October 2004. https://fee.org/resources/property-and-freedom-the-inseparable-connection/

“The Nazi appealed to the socialist traditions of German labor, declaring the worker ‘a pillar of the community,’ and the ‘bourgeois’—along with the traditional aristocracy—a doomed class. Hitler, who told associates that he was a ‘socialist,’ had the party adopt the red flag and, on coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday; Nazi Party members were ordered to address one another as ‘comrades (Genossen). His conception of the part was, like Lenin’s, that of a militant organization a Kampfbund, or ‘Combat League.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 260

“Moscow’s insistence that ‘fascism’ was the polar opposite of ‘communism’ found wide acceptance in socialist and liberal circles in the West.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 218

“Stoicism’s contribution to the shaping of the Western intellectual tradition is probably second only to that of Jewish monotheism. If monotheism advanced the revolutionary concept of an all-powerful and all-pervasive but non-material God ruling the universe, the theory of Natural Law posited that God’s universe was rational and capable of being grasped by human intelligence.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 7

“Communism, Fascism and National Socialism exacerbated and exploited popular resentments—class, racial and ethnic—to win mass support and to reinforce the claim that they, not the democratically elected governments, expressed the true will of the people. All three appealed to the emotion of hate.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 262