Political Purge Quotes

When a new president comes in, a new president gets to clean house.

I can remember the morning after President Nixon won re-election in 1972. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called a Cabinet meeting and told the members: 'You are all a bunch of burned-out volcanoes;' and asked for their resignations.

When they finally decided to do McCarthy in, Nixon was the fellow they selected, and he was perfectly willing to turn on his conservative friends and cut their throats….Nixon was a superb hatchet man.

Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.

You [Robespierre] will follow us soon. Your house will be beaten down and salt sown in the place where it stood.

Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.

Stalin loved trials so long as everyone got shot at the end.

I heard that senior officials in China and the United States were discussing whether to encourage a coup in North Korea to get a more pliable ruler. So I've taken steps to ensure that this can't happen. The man in our government closest to the Chinese, who could have arranged such a coup attempt, was my uncle. The man who would have been my natural replacement was my half brother. Both have been liquidated, as have more than 100 disloyal high-level officials.

Everybody must be removed [from public office] who has the mentality of the capitalist.

In France, the leader of Jacobinism perished on the guillotine; with us, the change of leadership was achieved by means of arrest and banishment. The technique of the process is gentler, but its essence is the same.

North Korea, under its thirtysomething Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, is no country for old men. The latest casualty in Kim's ongoing purge of the senior military command was the defense minister, Hyon Yong-chol, who reportedly committed the classic old man's offense of falling asleep in a meeting.

These are career non-partisan apolitical staffers with a combined 150 years of experience at the State Department gone, just like that right off the top [right after Secretary Rex Tillerson was sworn in].

Those who are opposed to armed uprising ... must be ruthlessly kicked out as enemies, traitors and cowards.

To do de-Baathification without an agreed process of reconciliation threw tens of thousands of people out of their jobs, out of their homes, out of their future, and even robbed them of their position in society.

I think cleaning house at the CIA needed to happen.

To the credit of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, people have been expelled or marginalized. Pat Buchanan in the '90s. Ron Paul, Rand Paul in the first decade of this century. Bill Buckley famously expelled the Birchers in 1964. It's been a movement that's tried to maintain its boundaries.

The Tea Party is clearing gunk out of the fuel lines of this country. It started with throwing out Democrats, but the Republicans are going to be next. We're doing what needs to be done for the sake of the country.

There's nothing so improves the mood of the Party as the imminent execution of a senior colleague.

I wrote a study about this question, The Lessons of October, which served as a pretext for my elimination from the government.

Republicans, Weed Out Your Progressives