Rudolph Rummel Quotes (1932-2014)

“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.”

“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.”