14 quotes
Poor man: history will never forgive him for proposing Ceausescu as the new general secretary of the party on the death, in 1965, of Gheorghiu-Dej.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
North Korea is an abomination to man as a freethinking individual.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
To write anything about Ceausescu without discussing his secret police is like Hamlet without the Prince, everybody else and the skull.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
This is a horror story – a true one – about a monster who came to be president of a country.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
In Ceausescu's Romania madness was enthroned, sanity a disease.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
Andrei, easily the most intelligent and sophisticated of the long-lasting sycophants, could well have behaved decently – in return for what favours one can only guess. Perhaps he was genuinely a good man. Perhaps.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
It enjoyed the material and spiritual backing of the German Nazis and the Fascists under Mussolini, and combined Jew-baiting with apocalyptical orthodoxy, appeals to Romanian nationalism with a samurai's reverence for violent death and suicide.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
Paranoia appears to be the occupational disease of any Romanian ruler, and Carol II was no exception. Like Ceausescu, he knocked down buildings near his home – in this case, the Royal Palace – to make a clear field for machine-gun fire.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
For most of its history Romania has been divided, skewered and kebabed by a succession of foreign invaders and masters, some of whom were unspeakably nasty. Cruel as Ceausescu's time was, it was not without precedent in his country's history.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
Virtually any description of life under the monarchy makes anyone who knows Ceausescu's Bucharest wince with regret for the good old days. Architecture, cuisine, culture, press freedom, prison conditions, freedom to travel, to go to church: all seem to have been better before the communists. Only the quantity of whores in Bucharest appears to have remained constant.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
Red Horizons is no better than Bucharest secret policeman's gossip: sordid, dully pornographic, intrusive, morally repugnant, incoherent yet endlessly fascinating. Ceausescu is seen as a power-mad, deeply dishonest paranoiac, as well as someone who cheats at chess. Elena comes of worse, if that is possible, as a sluttish, bad-tempered moron.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
To understand the extraordinary fact of Ceausescu's monolithic power, and the otherwise incomprehensible lack of resistance to it, one must try to experience the sheer dead weight the Romanians bore day in, day out. During the twenty-four years of his reign, their thoughts were blunted and restricted by what George Orwell might have called 'Homagespeak'.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
The Ceausescu cult was fed by a job lot of Westerners keen to do business with the one Eastern European leader who could, it appeared, stand up to the Russians and survive. At first, there was a trickle, then a torrent of Western visitors all singing Ceausescu's tune, none of them too choosy about the reality of the man they met – the myth was too much to their liking.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
The effect of Pacepa's defection on Ceausescu's mental state was to destabilise him even more. He became quite crazy for a time and suffered a further, permanent loss of proportion. What talent there remained in his circle was removed in the whitch-hunt that followed the defection.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)