As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was contribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium.... In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.

— Robert Conquest

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling Then very pissed-off with your schooling Then fucks, and then fights Next judging chaps' rights Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

— Robert Conquest

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

— Robert Conquest

The psychosphere, the blogosphere, is permeated by concepts, ideas, verbalization, a whole apparatus devised, or rather evolved, to form some sort of mental contact with reality--or to block it off. That is, a large circle of the "thinking," "educated" class take ideas as more vertical than facts.

— Robert Conquest

To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.

— Robert Conquest