Quotes by Robert Conquest

“To congratulate oneself on ones warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault”

“Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.”

“I think once you accept that you have the answer to everything, you can do anything to bring it about because your enemies are trying to stop you, are enemies of reason, of truth of everything - enemies of the future. You represent the people, you represent the nation, you represent everything that is good and that entitles you to destroy the bad people.”

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

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.

Seven Ages: first puking and mewlingThen very pissed-off with your schoolingThen fucks, and then fightsNext judging chaps rightsThen sitting in slippers: then drooling.

To congratulate oneself on ones warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.

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 acontribution 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 didnt.