Robert Conquest Quotes

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.

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

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.

One good rule is that the language in Soviet secret documents ordering that action be taken is usually valid, while other information may be mere Party-line myth—as with the 1933 secret instructions to blockade the Ukraine and the Kuban to prevent famine victims escaping northward. The operational order was intended to be obeyed, and it was. The explanation given was false: that the peasants were acting on instructions of Socialist Revolutionaries and the Polish intelligence service.

On political matters basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumour at a high political or police level.

"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."

Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay.

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.

I told you so, you fucking fools.

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

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

As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was a
contribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.

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.

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.