Richard Pipes Quotes

...the collapse of tsarism, while not improbably, was certainly not inevitable.

In the end [after the 1905 revolution], Russia gained nothing more than a breathing spell.

Cities can be rebuilt, industries can be rebuilt, what really matters are strategy forces, military forces and the cadres leaders, political, military and economic.

If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies.

Somebody who sticks to his guns can be called a stubborn person or a principled person, it depends on whether you like his ideas or not. You can call somebody whose ideas you don't like an ideologist or a person of ideas. You can call somebody whose actions you don't like a pragmatist if you like them, or an opportunist if you don't.

We need to keep a very keen eye on our own government. It's getting too rich and redistributing wealth is a sure way of robbing us of our private property rights and other rights along with them.

Hitler did not have Mussolini's revolutionary socialist background... Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the 'bourgeoisie' and 'capitalism' and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives 'socialist' and 'worker' in the official name of Hitler's party ('The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party') had not merely propagandistic value... On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.'