Soviet Quotations

I'm for fighting a war on terrorism, not a war in Southwest Asia that Alexander the Great couldn't win, the British Empire couldn't win, the Soviet Union couldn't win. That's stupid. It's a waste of resources; a waste of America's best and brightest.

From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the aviator has been the archetype of masculine glamour. Aviators have personified national ideals, from French elan to Soviet party discipline. They've inspired lust and admiration. They've turned sunglasses and short, utilitarian leather jackets into fashion statements.

So seven new countries, three of them formerly part of the Soviet Union, and the others part of the Warsaw Pact, will become full members of NATO next year.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.

I am also one of those persons who were transformed, who grew out of the Soviet system and transformed myself into the new Russia.

Malicious attacks on the Soviet Union produce a natural feeling of indignation.

The Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy, and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union.

I distinctly remember the vivacious optimism that inundated the United States when the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. This was not glee generated by the doom of an implacable enemy, but thrill germinated by the real possibilities that the future held for freedom.

In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture.

Well, the Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside Soviet Union, there's no doubt about that.

This power, this authority, Soviet power: they killed everybody who could make any resistance, who could explain his own way of thinking and who could follow his own way of thinking, of believing.

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights.

During my many years in international business and public life, I have had the good fortune of sitting down for lunch with people with whom I completely disagreed, in practice and principle: Soviet communists, heads of state from various unsavory regimes, benighted religious figures, corrupt business leaders.

I remember as a child going to an exhibit about the Soviet Union, and every paper had this alien smell. The paper and the ink were all exported. It was like a piece of cheese from that country, you could touch it, feel it, smell it, and it was different.

Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

I decided to go into politics because of our Soviet-style government.

Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.

Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

I grew up a little girl in the Soviet Union playing at a small sports club. Tennis gave me my life.

Japan cannot conquer China with America in her rear, Soviet Russia on her right and England on her left - her most powerful enemies in the South Sea all flanking her. It is this international situation that constitutes one of Japan's great weaknesses.

I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. 'Please don't take away our precious Soviet Union! - We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!'

Reagan won the Cold War by first restoring America's economy and military and then staring down an economically weakened Soviet Union. He knew defeating Russia couldn't be accomplished without laying the groundwork.

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

Architects design buildings; that's what we do, so we have to go with the flow; and, even though I'm still an old Leftie, global capitalism does have its good side. It's broken down barriers - the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union - it's raised a lot of people up economically, and for architects, it has meant that we can work around the world.

When the Soviet Union fell, optimistic scholars believed the world had shifted inexorably in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Instead, the West gradually embraced bigger government and weaker social bonds, creating a fragmented society in which the only thing we all belong to, as President Barack Obama puts it, is the state.

One has this image of the Soviet state and the Red Army as being extremely disciplined but in the first four months of 1945 their soldiers were completely out of control.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

If you're so committed to liberty that you see the Soviet Union as a threat, you're a Republican. If you're kind of indifferent to freedom and the level of the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union is just a question of extent and not really threatening to anybody, then you're a Democrat.

Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn't compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories.

Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.

What he wanted to do was close a vulnerability to the West; to have an intercontinental, long-range bomber equal to the B-29, which became even more crucial after 1949 with the first Soviet atomic weapon.

We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy.

We want to return our team to the glory days of the Soviet Union.

There is no doubt that the second President Bush inherited a very serious terrorist threat, though not such a threat as had been represented by the totalitarian Great Powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The people of Pakistan assisted the Afghan people during our long years of problems, during the Soviet invasion, they provided all possible assistance. So when they are in need, the people of Afghanistan share their pain and want to do whatever possible to assist.

What we asked for were weapons so that we could defend ourselves -- that's what we asked of the Soviet Union, of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, of the Algerians, of the Vietnamese; and that's what we received so that we could arm the Nicaraguan people and defend ourselves in that war imposed on us by Ronald Reagan's Administration over a number of years.

When I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union, I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the U.S. would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests.

One basis for society is that of helping your neighbor -- but in the software world this is piracy. To prevent this, the U.S. is putting in place practices which are like those in the former Soviet Union -- computerized guards, propaganda in favor of licensing, rewards for informing on co-workers, and penalties which make distributing software as serious a crime as armed robbery.

Obviously, when the old Soviet Union broke down, I think it took some years until they feel they are a country again. And I think now, they have really come together again.

Of course, the kind of support that Cuba could give us was very limited when it came to building up our army, since they didn't manufacture armaments in the quantities that we required. So we turned to Algeria and the Soviet Union for support.

No chronology of Soviet atrocities can convey the crushing of the human spirit under Lenin and his successors. But the retelling of 70 years of grisly facts leaves little doubt that what we face today in Soviet communism is, indeed, an 'evil empire'.

On New Year's Day 1992 there was no more a Soviet Union. We had to start all over again with a new set of people.

On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold.

I wouldn't even go into the history of the last days of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal from Europe, and what promises were given at that time, because those were oral promises, and our leaders of that time strongly believe that, like in ancient Russia, a word given is better than any treaty.

If we knew there was a Russian family around, we'd try to get together, especially around holidays. Although the former Soviet states are now separate, we still feel ties together with the people of Russia or Ukraine or Belarus or Serbia. We were brought up with this culture and religion. Especially here in the U.S., it's important to keep our religion and heritage.

I do not think that the Chinese Communist Party is going to implode and collapse like it did in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This Communist Party is going to fight to stay in power, and it will use the military to stay there.

I have a Ph.D. in philosophy and sports science. At 14, I went through this really tough Soviet training system. A lot of my roommates got psychologically broken or physically injured. Either you came through, or you were out. I made my Ph.D. work in the field of young athletes aged 14-19 because at this age any human is changing.

I have learned that being a politician is not an easy job. My father was trying to make progress in the peace treaty with the Soviet Union. At that time, he was suffering from last-stage cancer, but he visited Moscow in the bitter cold. I learned from my father that you may have to risk your own life to make such a historic accomplishment.

If in Soviet times we had Stalinism, in Belarus today we have Lukashenko-ism.

For us, the Second World War and its sequels will end only ... when we become members of the NATO alliance and when we can be assured of not ever being occupied again as we were by two occupying powers: Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered.

He went back to record the meltdown of Chernobyl, and his friends say he just disappeared. This man was trying to record the disaster, but it was still the Soviet Union, and I'm sure many of them did not want him doing this.

He is most widely remembered in foreign-policy circles for being the United States' representative at the multiparty negotiation over the future of divided Germany. He persuaded the Bush administration to embrace German unity despite the qualms of allies and alarm in the former Soviet Union.

We measured numbers of people and platforms in the Cold War because we were preparing for an essentially attritional campaign, holding back Soviet forces,

Kennedy was president for only 1,037 days, but during his short tenure, he achieved much. At the Cold War's most dangerous hour, he preserved the peace. He improved relations with the Soviet Union and replaced tension over Berlin with a limited test ban treaty.

Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.

I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups.

I was considered the bad boy of Soviet tennis,

My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.

My public stand represented a turning point for me and my entire future. The article very quickly became known throughout the world. For a long time the Soviet press contained no mention of the Progress, and later references were either disapproving in the extreme or else ironic. A great many critics, even if sympathetically disposed towards me, regarded my reflections in this work as exceedingly naive and speculative.

Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!

Like several hundred thousand fellow Karelians, we became refugees in our own country as great power politics caused the borders of Finland to be redrawn and left my home town as part of the Soviet Union.

I think if you compare nation-building in other situations: after the war in Europe, building up stable nations from the collapse of the Soviet Union, look at Afghanistan; I think that is a reasonable prospect.

Many achievements of the Soviet epoch laid the foundation for modern society. All this should be remembered. The repeal of the Nov. 7 holiday will bring nobody the laurels of a hero.

We never wanted to do any business with the Soviet 'evil empire. We embargo Cuba, we don't trade with North Korea, but with China it's O.K. I just always argue, why is it? Why do we single out China?

I was proud of my Soviet country, of wearing Young Pioneer uniform, bombarded by my mother's Communist propaganda.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, followed just a few years later by East Germany's Soviet parent state, it appeared that after a half-century of hair-trigger tension, America's major security fears would ease.

We have been talking about globalization for a long time. Actually, the word has been incorrect because only half of the world has been part of the globalization process. But in the last ten years, the other half -- China, India, the countries of the former Soviet block -- has joined the capitalist system. And I like to say globalization is going global.

We were going to fight an enemy that was a symmetric threat, and they looked a lot like us -- the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want. That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field.

The policy of detente with the Soviet Union, which was begun by President Nixon in 1972, was broadly seen by 1975 in bad shape, if not in tatters. In other words, were able to take advantage of the relaxed atmosphere to pursue the same goals they had.

What we have seen in Eastern Europe, particularly in some of the former Soviet republics, is just a very accelerated increase in infection, primarily through intravenous drug use.

We have been getting out of the situation where we found ourselves in the early '90s, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the Russian Federation became what it is - you know, with no borders, with no budget, no money, and with huge problems starting with lack of food and so on and so forth.

There has only been one time in history when both the United States and the Soviet Union put their nuclear forces on alert, and that was over the Middle East,

Without the Soviet Union's material base, Russia now is playing the part of a global power comparable to the United States. The current Russian elite shares a Soviet vision of the world ... and it's trying to imitate Soviet diplomatic efforts.

The question was asked, 'What can seven divisions do to stop a Soviet attack? ... And the answer very explicitly was: They can guarantee that if the Soviets attack and kill or capture 300,000 Americans, the war won't end there.

This sentimental comedy by the Soviet playwright Aleksei Arbuzov is said to have had a great success in its own country. So do fringed lamp shades.

There are indications that domestic and foreign policies of the Party enjoy the unanimous support of all the Soviet people.

Under the old Soviet system, with closed borders, they didn't have a real problem or issue. Nobody crossed the line under the Soviet system. They knew what would happen. But once they opened the borders, theoretically at least, that all changed.

The government views the media as a tool to deliver information about its decisions, like it was in the Soviet times. It only gives the information it wants to give.

The government's crackdown on civil society is unprecedented, even in Uzbekistan's 14-year history of repression since independence from the Soviet Union.

The origins of my career as a peace mediator can be found from my childhood years. I was born in the city of Viipuri, then still part of Finland. We lost Viipuri when the Soviet Union attacked my country. Along with 400,000 fellow Karelians, I became an eternally displaced person in the rest of Finland.

What place does the possibility of a second front occupy in the Soviet estimates of the current situation? A most important place; one might say a place a first-rate importance

We knew from the very beginning that this was a Soviet crime. There were letters (from the detention camp) that people received, including from my own father. All of a sudden the letters stopped coming. We were aware that something happened in the spring of 1940. There was no doubt.

Every time a Soviet plane took off, NSA knew about it. It was pretty easy to track. Now they have to track people who use cell phones, pay phones and calling cards ... You have to be a bit optimistic to think it will work.

Every community has its stars, and in the community of Hillel in the former Soviet Union, Chaplin was definitely a star, ... Everybody knew him.

During Apollo, there was no incentive to make things less expensive, only to win and beat the Soviet Union, ... That same philosophy that allowed us to win the space race slowed us down after the space race. The same people were in charge, the same philosophy was there. There was no incentive to make it economical or commercially feasible.

There was a conviction that the socialist cause was a just one, and so wherever there were struggles against colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism, the Soviet Union would support those struggles and those causes, in the form of economic and military help. The economic assistance that the Soviet Union gave Nicaragua was invaluable.

The shift has been toward the former Soviet Union to Asian countries. We're seeing a lot in China now that we didn't see in the past cycle.

The shift has been toward the former Soviet Union to Asian countries.

The Soviet Union, which has complained recently about alleged anti-Soviet themes in American advertising, lodged an official protest this week against the Ford Motor Company's new campaign: 'Hey you stinking fat Russian, get off my Ford Escort.'

Texas does not need Big Brother watching over us; this is America, not Soviet Russia.

Ten nations, mostly from the former Soviet Union, including Russia itself with its 13 per cent rate, have embraced a flat tax. And the economies of these countries are reaping their reward: they far outpace crusty old Europe in GDP growth and job creation. China, Germany and Spain could be the next dominoes to fall.

The one great exception to the apathy on reunification is, naturally enough, Berlin. Encircled by the hostile Soviet Zone for ten years, at times blockaded and constantly at the Russians' mercy, Berliners are committed to this one goal with a unique urgency.

Competition and competitive rhetoric can be healthy. It's what drove the United States to pursue the Soviet Union into space, creating countless innovations along the way.