Rudolph Rummel Quotes

Where people are free, political violence is minimal.

Increasing freedom in the world decreases the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever reduces and then finally ends the scourge of war in our history, without causing a greater evil, must be the greatest moral good. And this is freedom.

The more libertarian a state, the significantly less internal violence it has, and the significantly and predictably (in variance terms) lower its possible peak violence.

The citizens of democracies are the least likely to be murdered by their own government; the citizens of totalitarian, especially Marxist systems, the most likely.

The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking Power, i.e., through fostering democratic freedom.

Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.

The social structure of a free, democratic society creates the psychological conditions for its greater internal peace.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

Killing that is explicitly permitted is not democide.

Democracy is a metasolution to the problem of diversity.

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