Experimental Blog # 193

Quotations, notes, and comments from "Beyond Peace" by Richard Nixon

"Rampant private enterprise, totally unrestrained by enlightened but limited government, would have a heart full of capital and an empty soul."
"Those on the right and left pursue their extreme convictions too uncompromisingly. But the most disappointing group of political leaders are the mushy moderates. They compromise and temporize < > until they stand for nothing." Richard Nixon writes very well and these immoderate and contradictory sentiments might even be a little bit amusing, but at other times in this book he is not so funny.

"The popular idea that the United Nations can play a larger role in resolving international conflicts is illusory."
"We should enlist U.N. support for our policies but not put the U.N. in charge of them."

"In 1994, for the first time in ten visits to Moscow in thirty-five years, I was able to meet with all the leading opposition leaders." Apparently, in Richard Nixon's annual visits to Russia in 1993 and 1994 he met and talked with at least 14 government and other political people including: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Zhirinovsky, Rutskoi, Yavlinski, Shahrai, Shokhin, Chernomydrin, Kozyrev, Grachev, Gaidar, Lobov, Zyuganov, and Stankevich. Besides them he met and talked with; Kravchuk, in Ukraine; Gorbunous, in Latvia; Walesa, in Poland; and Havel, in the Czech Republic.

"The grisly history of the twentieth century demonstrates the evil that can be done by governments that try to change human nature. < > Though these attempts ultimately failed, they inflicted death on more than 160 million people through deliberate and "politically motivated carnage.""

"Religious beliefs also help to inoculate Americans against the "idea of the infinite perfectibility of man," to which, Tocqueville observed, democracies are especially prone." Again Richard Nixon refers to "the world's great religions - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism - {which} have inspired people for centuries." This is not the only time that Richard Nixon has omitted Hinduism in his list of "the world's great religions." Although Hinduism is often referred to as the world's oldest religion, besides having hundreds of millions of followers, he never gives any explanation.

"Beyond Peace is my tenth book, and my ninth since resigning the Presidency twenty years ago this year. After completing my first, Six Crises, in 1962, I vowed that I would never write another. Since then, I have learned to make less Sherman-like promises. This volume completes a six-volume series with an emphasis on East-West relations that I began in 1979 with The Real War..."

Richard Nixon completed Beyond Peace on March 30, 1994. Nineteen days later, on April 18, Richard Nixon "suffered a severe stroke" and died four days later on April 22, 1994.