Gennady Yanayev Quotes

Simply eight young men … standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundation of another not yet laid …. No police were functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of the administration hung idle, battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions.

When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.

What would happen if we withdrew? Anarchy and confusion.

For ten years from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was wracked by poverty and social decay: the country suffered a demographic collapse on a scale never before witnessed in an industrial country outside of wartime as deaths outstripped births and the country’s population shrank by some 800,000 people each year.

There is no greater evil than anarchy.

As soon as control eases, there is chaos. [Yi fang, jiu luan.]

Today in Russia, we have this extreme form of democracy, which is called anarchy.

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

When governments become weak, troubles are certain to erupt.

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.

Whenever government abandons law, it proclaims anarchy.

The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development.

Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.

Anarchy is as detestable in grammar as it is in society.

Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.

Where you have no religion, you are sure to have no government, for as religion disappears, anarchy takes place and fixes a compleat Hell on earth till religion returns.

A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.

The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

We paid a big price for not stopping it -- that is the looting and the security -- because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness. We never had enough troops on the ground

It is then a very unseasonable time to plead law, when swords are in the hands of the vulgare, or to think to restrain them with fear of punishments when they look after liberty and shake off all government.

It is when empires begin to fall, that they tend to cause the most mayhem.

I have arrived at only a few sure conclusions: 1. For us, (South) America is ungovernable. 2. He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. 3. The only thing we can do in (South) America is emigrate. 4. This country will eventually fall into the hands of the unbridled mob, and will proceed to almost imperceptible petty tyrannies of all complexions and races. 5. Devoured as we are by every kind of crime and annhilated by ferocity Europeans will not go to the trouble of conquering us. 6. If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primordial chaos, that would be (South) America’s final state.

Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate … neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding states…. Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order

You see the problem of an unstable White House from the outside and worry about it. But from the inside, it is 50 times worse.