Milovan Djilas Quotes

Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.

Frankly, I wouldn't put anything past him [Nixon] and those damn technocrats. You can't begin to compete with the professional Nixonites when it comes to deception.... If Nixon told them to nationalize the railroads, they'd have nationalized the railroads. If he'd told them to exterminate the Jews, they'd have exterminated the Jews.

Mr. Nixon … will, with time, be a landmark in the history of quiet, determined desperation.

Look through the whole histories of countries professing the Romish religion and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.

… a man steeped in falsehood … who had recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience …. He would sell his grandmother for any advantage.

I don’t understand why Jackie O[nassis] thinks she’s so grand that she doesn’t owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big. You’d think she’d want to scheme and connive to get into history again.

The communist experiment should never be forgotten otherwise it may be repeated.

The stock market is a racket. Those guys are crooks.

Etiquette requires us to admire the human race.

History is one of those things that politicians tend not to use.

We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time,or as the greatest criminals

… an Attila educated by Machiavelli

On whatever side we regard the history of Europe, we shall perceive it to be a tissue of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, of politics without design, and wars without consequence.

Stalin's methods did not help.

As Minister of Economics, Funk accelerated the pace of rearmament and as Reichsbank president banked for the SS the gold teeth fillings of concentration camp victims, probably the most ghoulish collateral in banking history.

Joseph Stalin was a supreme egotist and sadist, capable of sacrificing everything and anyone for the sake of his own power and glory.

Organized crime has a corrupting influence on all Bulgarian institutions including the government, parliament and judiciary. In an attempt to maintain their influence regardless of who is in power, organized crime figures dominate all the major political parties. As these figures have expanded into legitimate businesses, they have attempted—with some success—to buy their way into the corridors of power….

Putin has demonstrated his fondness for the Cold War…. Once a KBG agent, always a KGB agent.

Stalin could occasionally make Hitler look like a Boy Scout.

Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state.

The savage and brutal barbarity of our enemies … is a full demonstration of that there is not the least remains of virtue, wisdom, or humanity in the British Court

All his training as a lawyer and a judge was that you didn’t do illegal things. He could never accept that this is exactly what the CIA does when it operates abroad. We break the laws of their countries. It’s how we collect information. It’s why we’re in business.

… a closed world. … an almost perfect record of resisting change. … fragmented, loosely managed, and poorly coordinated. … often unable to gather intelligence about the things we care the most about. … analysts do not always tell the decision makers just how limited their information really is. … increasingly irrelevant to the new challenges presented by weapons of mass destruction. … espionage is always chancy at best. Still we have no choice but to do better.

As a Christian, I could never accept Communism. It is a crippling totalitarian disease.