Soviet Quotes - Page 20

• In the Soviet Union, for instance, the pressure on the chess stars was immense. When Boris Spassky came home after losing that match, he found he no longer had an apartment in Moscow.

  Liz Garbus

  Stars, Home, Moscow

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think during the Cold War in America at least, there was a division; there was the Soviet government and there were the oppressed people, who were not represented by this government. That was a massive oversimplification of what the true situation was there. There were certainly many people who were completely and fully alienated from the government.

  Joe Weisberg

  War, Thinking, Government

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• If we [Americans] are a strong people, a united people, why do we always have to hear how great we are? What is this self-love? Where does this come from? It got worse, because after the war we thought we'd won it. That's the first myth. Frankly, Russia won it. The Soviet Union sacrificed far greater form than anyone else to win that war. Secondly, we had the atomic bomb. We should not have dropped it on Japan. We did as an example to the Soviets, not to defeat Japan and to save American lives. These are myths that we explode with a lot of research early on.

  Oliver Stone

  Strong, War, Winning

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Kennedy was significantly different than Eisenhower before him, and different from Johnson after him. So those three years were the beginning of a détente with the Soviet Union, a new feeling for peace, a seeking out of a new ally with the Soviet Union - the end of the Cold War, as Kennedy called it in his American University speech.

  Oliver Stone

  War, Years, Feelings

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• JFK was leading the world, leading the United States into a new position with the Soviet Union. He was calling for the end of the Cold War. He would have been reelected in 1964 because he was vastly popular.

  Oliver Stone

  War, United States, Calling

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

  Joseph Stalin

  Law, Death Penalty, Liable

  Joseph Stalin (1952). “Works”

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• If you think that the people of the Soviet Union have any desire themselves, and moreover, by force, to alter the face of surrounding states, then you are badly mistaken.

  Joseph Stalin

  Thinking, People, Desire

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• In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.

  Paul Theroux

  Japan, Next Week, Years

  Paul Theroux (2012). “The Lower River”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I feel the happiest when I can light my American cigarettes with Soviet matches.

  Mohammed Daoud Khan

  Happiness, Light, America

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• In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

  Leon Trotsky

  Political, Personality, Substance

  "The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?"by Leon Trotsky, translated by Max Eastman, (ch. 11), 1936.

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• If I thought there was some reason to be concerned about them, I wouldn't be sleeping in this house tonight. (When asked about continued presence of Soviet nuclear submarines along US coastlines)

  Ronald Reagan

  Sleep, House, Nuclear

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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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• In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Country, Unions, Threatening

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• When I turn on the TV in Russia I see a general calmly claiming that our missiles are ahead of the latest American models by three five-year plans. It's a nightmare. We are creating a concept of the enemy, just as they did in the Soviet era. This is a giant step backward.

  Vladimir Sorokin

  Creating, Russia, Years

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• My television teaches me that everything was wonderful in the Soviet Union. According to the programs I watch, the KGB and apparatchiks were angels, and the Stalin era was so festive that the heroes of the day must still be celebrated today.

  Vladimir Sorokin

  Hero, Angel, Kgb

  "Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire". Interview with Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp, www.spiegel.de. February 2, 2007.

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• The word "people" is unpleasant to me. The phrase "Soviet people" was drummed into us from childhood on. I love concrete people, enlightened people who live conscious lives and do not simply sit there and vegetate. To love the people you have to be the general secretary of the Communist Party or an absolute dictator.

  Vladimir Sorokin

  Party, People, Childhood

  "Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire". Interview with Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp, www.spiegel.de. February 2, 2007.

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• As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything together. It was the sinister energy of our country.

  Vladimir Sorokin

  Country, Children, Law

  "'Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire'". Interview with Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp, www.spiegel.de. February 02, 2007.

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• When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another. Talk about Paleolithic and Neolithic.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Russia, Transition

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• During the Soviet era, private ownership was a crime punishable with up to five years in prison.

  Anatoly Chubais

  Years, Eras, Prison

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The first year I was in office, only about 800 people came out of the Soviet Union, Jews. By the third year I was in office... second year, 1979, 51,000 came out of the Soviet Union. And every one of the human rights heroes - I'll use the word - who have come out of the Soviet Union, have said it was a turning point in their lives, and not only in the Soviet Union but also in places like Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland [they] saw this human rights policy of mine as being a great boost to the present democracy and freedom that they enjoy.

  Jimmy Carter

  Hero, Rights, Years

  "Interview with President Jimmy Carter". Index of coldwar Interviews. Episode-18, nsarchive.gwu.edu.

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• One of the greatest concerns that I had when I became President was the vast array of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union and a few other countries, and also the great proliferation of conventional weapons, non-nuclear weapons, particularly as a tremendous burden on the economies of developing or very poor countries.

  Jimmy Carter

  Country, President, United States

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• I think the big tragedy of the Cuban Revolution was that it became dependent on the Soviet Union, and it became dependent on the Soviet Union under a very reactionary bureaucratic regime led by Leonid Brezhnev.

  Tariq Ali

  Thinking, Tragedy, Unions

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.

  Milton Friedman

  Impact, Discovery, Community

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• Now all of us deplore this vast military spending. Yet, in the face of the Soviet attitude, we realize its necessity. Whatever the cost, America will keep itself secure. But in the process we must not, by our own hand, destroy or distort the American system. This we could do by useless overspending. I know one sure way to overspend. That is by overindulging sentimental attachments to outmoded military machines and concepts.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Attitude, Military, War

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