Rudolph Rummel on Politics

"Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression."

"The more libertarian a state, the significantly less internal violence it has, and the significantly and predictably lower its possible peak violence."

"The citizens of democracies are the least likely to be murdered by their own government; the citizens of totalitarian, especially Marxist systems, the most likely."

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

"Libertarian states have no violence between themselves. The more libertarian two states, the less their mutual violence. The more libertarian a state, the less its foreign violence."

"Democracy is a metasolution to the problem of diversity."

"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."

"The more constrained the power of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers."

"In a few cases, regimes have publicized their murders, often to intimidate people. For instance, Communist Chinese government newspapers would report speeches by officials in which one might boast, ‘We killed 2 million bandits in the 10th region between November and January.’ The term bandit was standard lingo for presumed counterrevolutionaries."

"Aside from anarcho-libertarianism, there are two contending ideas of libertarianism. In its broad sense, libertarianism is equated with civil liberties and political rights—what we usually mean by democracy. Sweden, Japan, and the United States would thus be almost equally libertarian. In its narrow sense, libertarianism is equivalent to classical liberal democracy, adding to democracy the requirement of a free market. India would then be less libertarian than Japan; Israel less libertarian than West Germany. Theoretically, liberal democracies should have significantly less violence than socialist democracies, but both should have significantly less than nondemocracies."