Soviet Quotes - page 22

Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information that he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e. they were tortured just for the hell of it. (Clive James)
The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe. View quote
Mikhail Gorbachev
On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985, I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them: 'You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies, we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you.' View quote
Mikhail Gorbachev
The collapse of communism as an ideology and of the Soviet Union as a world power has made possible an unprecedented internationalization of current American values, among them free choice in the consumer marketplace, reduced government economic regulation and an emphasis on individual self-fulfillment rather than the social good, all promoted by an internationalized mass media and consumer culture. View quote
Eric Foner
Textbooks are Soviet propaganda. View quote
Jerry Falwell
In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history. View quote
Tariq Ali
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. View quote
Tariq Ali
If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay! View quote
Andrei Platonov
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate. View quote
Rush Limbaugh
We will put Polaris into the arms talks with the Soviet Union and hope to phase it out in multilateral negotiations... if the Russians ... fail to cut their nuclear forces accordingly it would be a new situation that we could consider at that time. View quote
Denis Healey
The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a sobriquet as the 'Iron Lady'. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the Right Honourable Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Honourable Lady herself, will learn of what metal she is made. (Enoch Powell)
The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell. View quote
Fareed Zakaria
In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement. View quote
George Orwell
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. View quote
Martin Rees
I saw in the Soviet Union many opponents of the regime. I visited a dozen prisons - the political sections among them. I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion. View quote
Roger Nash Baldwin
All through the years of the Soviet empire, its Politburo held 'elections.' Of course, calling something an election and actually having it be an election are different things. View quote
Benazir Bhutto
There is a U.S. press campaign suggesting that people should not be afraid of the communists; that they are good, honorable and kind people. I warn people not to believe this. More than half of them are fanatics; they would destroy everything. It would mean civil war. They would abolish the boundaries between the republics (of the former Soviet Union). They want to take back Crimea; they even make claims against Alaska. View quote
Boris Yeltsin
One of the major principles is that Soviet literature must be inseverably linked with the policy of the Communist party. View quote
Nikita Khrushchev
There's a tendency on the part of Americans, all of us, to say, 'Hey, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, we don't have to worry about these guys again.' We always have to be worried about them, we always have to be concerned about them, and we have to be well-informed. View quote
Russ Feingold
I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it's four. I mean it's that kind of numbers game The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union. Nobody wants to have their name, you know, besmirched on the front of newspapers and people say wicked things about them and their family and call them all sorts of names, accuse them of being anti-Semitic and everything else. I mean that's not part of my design. I don't enjoy experiencing that. That's just coming from some place that I have no control over. View quote
Mel Gibson
Rev. and Mrs. Moon boldly entered Moscow in April 1990 and had a one-on-one meeting in the Kremlin with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. This was another miracle to have occurred. Rev. Moon conveyed his support to Gorbachev of his policies of glasnost and perestroika. I was there to translate that extraordinary meeting. Rev. Moon persuaded Gorbachev to allow religious freedom, to allow God to enter the Soviet Union. In my opinion, this meeting was crucially important in the sight of God. It was, in a way, the beginning of a peaceful process of the demise of the Soviet empire. Rev. Moon indeed motivated Gorbachev in the direction of peaceful reform. The greatest miracle that occurred in this century was the liberation of the Soviet Union without nuclear war. The threat of nuclear war was the single greatest concern of Rev. Moon. He said, "Thank God, not a single nuclear weapon was used against mankind since 1945." (Bo Hi Pak)
The Pakistani military created the Taliban in 1995 - six years after the Red Army left Afghanistan. Al Qaeda funneled money to some mujahedeen, but never played a role in the fighting. Even the mujahedeen couldn't claim to have driven out the Red Army - which left as part of Mikhail Gorbachev's strategic retreat. And the Communist regime remained for three years after the Soviets left, collapsing only when its Uzbek militia switched sides and, forging an alliance with Tajik fighters under Ahmad Shah Massoud, captured Kabul. The massive aid for the mujahedeen from America and allies proved a crucial factor in forcing the Soviet withdrawal. The claim that a handful of Pushtun, on their own, defeated the Red Army is laughable. View quote
Amir Taheri
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime. View quote
Salman Rushdie
But on that sunlit Sunday, Alexander knew nothing, thought nothing, imagined nothing. He forgot Dimitri and war and the Soviet Union and escape plans, and even America, and crossed the street for Tatiana Metanova. View quote
Paullina Simons
What happened in Brussels was a co-production by adepts of two sick ideologies. The first one is Islamism in its many versions, including Khomeinism in Iran, Talibanism in Afghanistan, Salafism in Arab countries, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and ISIS and its offshoots across the globe. It will remain firmly in place until it implodes under the weight of its savage contradictions, as did the old Soviet Union, or is defeated in a war, as was the case with Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. The other co-producer, the mushy and politically correct "liberal” ideology that has seduced segments of opinion in Western democracies, can and must be combated by all those who wish to protect the democratic system in an increasingly dangerous world. View quote
Amir Taheri