Soviet Quotes - Page 13

• Were there open gays and lesbians before the West started influencing Russia? No, there weren't. In fact, the most out person in the country, until recently, was me. I turned gay in America. I was a nice Soviet fourteen-year-old when I left, and I came back a lesbian.

  Masha Gessen

  Country, Nice, Gay

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• People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain.

  Vladimir Putin

  Regret, Heart, Russia

  Interview with German television channel ARD and ZDF, May 2005.

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• When we do in Grenada what the Soviet Union did in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, we lose moral authority and credibility.

  Jesse Jackson

  Unions, Moral, Authority

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• I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  War, United States, World

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• The reason why there is now no communist government in Paris is because in the circumstances of 1945 the Soviet army was not able to reach French soil.

  Joseph Stalin

  War, Army, Government

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• News for the godless: religion is inescapable. there has never been a human society without some form of worship. And don't point to communist societies like the Soviet Union - they worshipped blue jeans.

  Stephen Colbert

  Blue, Jeans, Religion

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• There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does notconcede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.

  Gerald R. Ford

  Country, Europe, United States

  The Second Carter−Ford Presidential Debate, October 6, 1976.

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• I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.
  [Referring to the trouble he had with the peer reviewers of Anglo-American astrophysical journals because his ideas often conflicted with the generally accepted or “standard"” theories.]

  Hannes Alfven

  Ideas, Peers, Conflict

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• You know, I've never believed, in anything, that you had to have role models who looked like you to do something. If I'd been waiting for a black, female, soviet specialist role model, I'd be still waiting.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Leadership, Wisdom, Work

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• 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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