Top 15 Rudolph Rummel Quotes

American academic (1932–2014)

Rudolph Joseph Rummel (October 21, 1932 – March 2, 2014) was professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Rummel coined the term “democide” for murder by government (compare genocide), such as the Stalinist purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

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Alternative Names: Rudolph Joseph Rummel • R. J. Rummel • Rummel's law

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People should not be free only because it is good for them. They should be free because it is their right as human beings.

The less democratic a country is, the move intense its foreign violence.

Well-established democracies do not make war on each other.

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.

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.

There is a good reason that all of this killing is unknown. The authoritarian and totalitarian thug regimes that do most of the killing usually control who writes their histories and what appears in them.

Democide is a government’s murder of people for any reason or no reason at all. Genocide is the murder of people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or language.

In the twentieth century, governments murdered, as a prudent estimate, 272,000,000 men, women and children. It could be over 400,000,000.

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

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

Freedom produces wealth and prosperity.

Democracy says, ‘Govern yourself, but do so in a manner consistent with the same right of others.’ Democracy does not lay down a template for each person’s life, as do dictatorships.

Democracy is a metasolution to the problem of diversity.

Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence and an antidote to war.

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.