Soviet Union Quotes - Page 8

• When I was a kid, I was like everyone else: afraid of getting nuked. We had drills in school - Sweden was very close to the Soviet Union. There was definitely a lot of tension.

  Dolph Lundgren

  School, Kids, Sweden

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?

  Doris Lessing

  Believe, Years, Forever

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• We are, if territory and population be looked at together, one of the great countries of the world - a monster country, one might say, along with others such as China, India, the recent Soviet Union, and Brazil. And there is a real question as to whether "bigness" in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.

  George F. Kennan

  Country, Real, Countries Of The World

  "Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy". Book by George F. Kennan, p. 143, 1993.

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• Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!

  C. Wright Mills

  Democracy, Unions, Leon

  "C. Wright Mills: The Last Six Months". Saul Landau, Ramparts Magazine (pp. 49-50), August 1965.

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• It was thought that to rally Islam against godless communism would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad turn indeed, and that, in fact, transpired.

  Edward Said

  Islam, Would Be, Unions

  Edward W. Said, David Barsamian (2003). “Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said”, p.107, Pluto Press

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• The freedoms which had been so hard won from colonial domination were being crushed by Soviet-inspired and funded military and political forces. Their clear intention was to deprive the people of their democratic freedoms. As history shows, this is what had happened in the Soviet Union and in Cuba, and continues to be the case in other parts of the world.

  Augusto Pinochet

  Military, People, Political

  Statement, November 08, 1998.

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• [Russians] want to bring us down to make them feel better about the failure of the Soviet Union. I don`t mean bring us down as in collapse, but bring us down a notch in a big way.

  Daniel Fried

  Mean, Feel Better, Unions

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• I came up during the cold war, and during the cold war it was always possible with the then Soviet Union - the Russian leaders behaved carefully and predictably. They didn't engage in nuclear saber rattling. They were able to work with us and align their interests where possible.

  Ashton Carter

  War, Leader, Nuclear

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• In fact, we haven't ever really recalibrated our foreign policy commitments since the end of the Cold War. We still have alliances throughout Asia and across Europe that were devised to tame the Soviet Union, which, last time I checked, ceased to exist more than 20 years ago. Today, of course, we have a commitment to go to nuclear war with Russia in case Russia invades Latvia. To me, that's complete and utter nonsense. There ought to be a reconsideration of our posture in every region of the world.

  Kevin Gutzman

  War, Commitment, Russia

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• What happened to the Soviet Union happened mainly for domestic reasons. It was a failure of the model based on a command economy and dictatorship. The rejection of freedom and democracy, the decisionmaking monopoly of one party, and the monopoly of one ideology all had a chilling effect on the country. That model turned out to be incapable of making structural changes. It did not open up ways for initiative and was overly centralized.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Country, Party, Rejection

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. November 12, 2003.

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• The organizing principle of the United States defensive foreign policy had been opposition to the Soviet Union. There is no more Soviet Union.

  Mark Shields

  Principles, United States, Unions

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think his [Reagan's] policy toward the Soviet Union was more risky than most people realize, and it was risky because of the paranoia and fear among the isolated old guard in Moscow.

  David E. Hoffman

  Thinking, People, Moscow

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• In light of 50 years of bondage of Eastern Europe, [invading the Soviet Union in 1948 to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons] was probably a reasonable thing to do.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Light, Years, Europe

  TIME Magazine, October 2002.

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• How can there be democracy if the leadership in the United States and Britain don't uphold the values which my father's generation fought the Nazis, millions of people gave their lives against the Soviet Union's regime, didn't they? Because of what? Democracy. And what democracy meant. No torture, no camps, no detention forever or without trial, without charges. In solitary confinement. Those techniques which are not just alleged, they have actually been written about by the FBI. I don't think it's being far left - I hope that I'm wrong to consider that it's far left to uphold the rule of law.

  Vanessa Redgrave

  Father, Thinking, Law

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• Like so many empires before it, the Soviet Union eventually imploded and fragmented, falling victim not so much to a direct military defeat as to disintegration accelerated by economic and social strains.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Military, Fall, Empires

  Zbigniew Brzezinski (1998). “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives”, p.9, Basic Books

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• The Soviet Union, and Russia as the successor state to the Soviet Union, is a founding member state of the United Nations and a permanent member of its Security Council.

  Vladimir Putin

  Russia, Unions, States

  "Interview of President Vladimir V.Putin to American TV channel CBS and PBS". Interview with Charlie Rose, m.rusemb.org.uk.

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• [2015] it's a time that there's a clash of ideologies, similar to the Cold War. I think that a story like this has been waiting to be told, and I think it's a fresh look at the whole earth-shattering business of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  Steven Knight

  War, Thinking, Waiting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I see the collapse of the Soviet Union as a great tragedy of the XX century.

  Vladimir Putin

  Tragedy, Unions, Century

  "Interview to American TV channel CBS and PBS". Interview with Charlie Rose, en.kremlin.ru. September 29, 2015.

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• When you look around the world, every place that socialism has been implemented, it has failed miserably, destroying the economy, freedom and - in Germany, the Soviet Union and other nations - millions of lives.

  Rick Perry

  Germany, Looks, World

  Source: stream.org

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• It was designed to have an impact on the stalemate over Mutually Assured Destruction with the Soviet Union. 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.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Memories, Moon, Impact

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• The Soviet Union is like the Cross without Christ, while American culture is like Christ without the Cross.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Culture, Unions, Christ

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• One of the signs of the imminent Apocalypse is the "bitterness of all waters," and anyone traveling through eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and its satellites-everywhere that the command economy operated, with its callous disregard for anything but narrow-focused abstract principle-could be forgiven for thinking that the Apocalypse was no longer imminent but in full cry. There's hardly a river, stream, or brook that isn't contaminated with the runoff from human misuse, whether industrial effluents, agricultural pesticides and herbicides, or worse.

  Marq de Villiers

  Thinking, Europe, Rivers

  Marq De Villiers (2001). “Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The Soviet Union attempted to export communism to the entire world. We know what came of that. Now the West is trying to export democracy, including to regions where there is no traditional foundation for it. That cannot end well.

  Vladimir Yakunin

  Trying, Democracy, Unions

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The Russian revolution did not occur until a generation after Marx's death. He was not involved with it, or with what came after it. His works do not describe post-capitalist society, and a fortiori they do not recommend any part of what the Soviet Union did.

  Allen W. Wood

  Unions, Revolution, Generations

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States.

  John F. Kennedy

  Nuclear Missiles, United States, Cuba

  Cuban Missile Crisis Address to the Nation, delivered 22 October 1962

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