Rudolph Rummel: Quotes about people

“The more constrained the power of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: Death by Government (1994), p. 2

People , Democracy

“Communists, when in control of a nation, have murdered more than 3.6 times the number of people killed in combat in all wars, including the two world wars.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 99

War , People , World , Time

“Our century is noted for its bloody wars. WW1 saw 9 million people killed in battle, an incredible record that was surpassed within a few decades by the 15 million battle deaths of WW2. Even the numbers killed in 20th century revolutions and civil wars have set historical records. In total, about 35,654,000 people have died in this century’s international and domestic wars, revolutions, and violent conflicts. Yet, even more unbelievable than these vast numbers killed in war is a shocking fact. The number of people killed by totalitarian or extreme authoritarian governments already exceeds that for all wars, civil and international. Indeed, this number already approximates the number that might be killed in a nuclear war.”

Rudolph Rummel

“War Isn’t This Century’s Biggest Killer, The Wall Street Journal (July 7, 1986)

Death , War , People

“In a few cases, regimes have publicized their murders, often to intimidate people. For instance, Communist Chinese government newspapers would report speeches by officials in which one might boast, ‘We killed 2 million bandits in the 10th region between November and January.’ The term bandit was standard lingo for presumed counterrevolutionaries.”

Rudolph Rummel

People

“[There is an] unbridgeable chasm in the world. On one side are such criminal gangs, sanctified by the term government, and the United Nations they dominate, enforcing by their guns mass slavery, mass death, mass violence, mass impoverishment, and mass famine. On the other side are democratic countries where people are free, secure, and need not fear mass impoverishment, murder at the hands of government agents, and killing famines.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 12

Death , People , World , Fear

“The more freedom a people have, the more unlikely the government will murder them. Democratically free governments do not murder their own people.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 14

People , Freedom

“I conclude that 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 , Freedom

“Possibly 20,000,000 were killed in the war against the Nazis and from Nazi occupation, but many more millions were killed in Stalin’s simultaneous war on his own people.”

Rudolph Rummel book Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917

Source: Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (1990), p. 152

War , People

“Power is dispersed through many different families, churches, schools, universities, corporations, partnerships, business associations, scientific societies, unions, clubs, and myriad other associations. There’s plenty of competition, and people have overlapping interests. The social order isn’t controlled by anybody—it evolves spontaneously.”

Rudolph Rummel

People , School , Family , Business

“The more democratic freedom a people have, the less severe their internal political violence.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 63

People , Freedom

“Saying that a state or regime is a murderer is a convenient personification of an abstraction. Regimes are in realty people with the power to command a whole society. It is these people that have committed the kilo- and megamurders of our century, and we must not hide their identity under the abstraction of the ‘state,’ ‘regime,’ ‘government,’ or ‘communist.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: Death by Government (1994), p. 8

People

“Where people are free, political violence is minimal.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 13

People

“In total, communist (Marxist-Leninist) regimes murdered nearly 148 million people from 1917 to 1987. For a perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the twentieth century killed in combat around 41 million.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 99

War , People

“The more people are free, the greater their human development and national wealth. In short, freedom is the way to economic and social human security.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 13

People , Way , Freedom , Wealth

“The less freedom people have the more violence, the more freedom the less violence. I put this here as the Power Principle: power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: Death by Government (1994), p. xvi

People , Freedom

“It is sad that hundreds of thousands of people can be killed by governments with hardly an international murmur, while a war killing several thousand people can cause an immediate world outcry and global reaction.”

Rudolph Rummel

“War Isn’t This Century’s Biggest Killer, The Wall Street Journal (July 7, 1986)

War , People , World , Sadness

“Most of the world's people have been robbed of their freedom by tyrants… In the last century alone, 272,000,000 were shot, burned, stabbed, tortured, beaten, starved to death, blasted to death, buried alive, or whatever other ways of murdering their slaves these thugs could imagine. This horrific and evil toll of bodies could head-to-toe circle the earth more than ten times. It is as though a catastrophic nuclear war had happened, but its mountain of deaths spread over each day of the last century”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 11

Death , War , People , World

“Libertarian states are by theory not only less violence prone, but when foreign relations includes the perception of other libertarian states, this inhibition becomes a mutual barrier to violence. Their mutual domestic diversity and pluralism, their free and competitive press, their people-to-people and elite-to-elite bonds and relationships, and their mutual identification and sympathy will foreclose on any expectation or occurrence of war between them; violence may occur only in the most extraordinary and unusual circumstances, or at the margins of what it means to be libertarian.”

Rudolph Rummel

“Libertarianism and International Violence”, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 27, Sage Publications, March 1, 1983, p. 27-71

War , People

“Free people never have famine.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 13

People

“The less free the people within any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the war between them; the greater their freedom, the less likely such wars occur. Free people do not make war on each other.”

Rudolph Rummel

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 14

War , People , Freedom