Skip to content

It is sad that hundreds of thousands of people can be killed by governments with hardly an international murmur, while a war killing several thousand people can cause an immediate world outcry and global reaction.

— Rudolph Rummel

Another quote →

Source and credibility

Wikiquote does not flag this quote as disputed or misattributed.

Source: “War Isn’t This Century’s Biggest Killer, The Wall Street Journal (July 7, 1986)
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

More by Rudolph Rummel

The more people are free, the greater their human development and national wealth. In short, freedom is the way to economic and social human security.

The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

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

The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

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

The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

Democracy is a metasolution to the problem of diversity.

The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

Killing that is explicitly permitted is not democide.

Death by Government (1994)

Democracies don’t murder their citizens.

Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (1997)

The more libertarian a state, the significantly less internal violence it has, and the significantly and predictably (in variance terms) lower its possible peak violence.

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

The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

All Rudolph Rummel quotes →

More quotes by Rudolph Rummel

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

The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking Power, i.e., through fostering democratic freedom.

Death by Government (1994)

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

The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

Where people are free, political violence is minimal.

The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

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 Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

All Rudolph Rummel quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Rudolph Rummel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.