Rudolph Rummel

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"Democracy, according to the political scientist Rudolph Rummel, is a strongly protective feature of modern society, with democratic nations most unlikely to pursue mass killing of their enfranchised populations. This finding of Rummel's extensive quantitative studies has been supported by the quantitative research on the antecedents of genocide by scholars such as Barbara Harff."

"A prominent democratic peace theorist, Rudolph Rummel (1994) has made the point that between four and five times as many were killed by government (in democide) in the twentieth century as were killed in war."

"According to political scientist R.J. Rummel, citizens’ own governments are the greatest genocidal actors and mass killers of them all. In Death by Government (1994), Rummel showed that citizens have a much greater probability of dying at the hands of their own government than of foreign ones, again, adding credibility to the old adage that governments don’t protect people; people protect governments."

"But the twentieth century turned out to be the bloodiest in human history, confirming the worst fears of classical liberals who had always warned about government power. Perhaps nobody has done a better job documenting its horrors than University of Hawaii political science professor emeritus Rudolph J. Rummel."