David E. Hoffman Quotes

#1. I do not think he [Reagan] put names and faces together but for a small group of people. There were a few, perhaps half a dozen reporters, that Reagan recognized, including my colleague Lou Cannon, and some from television and the wire services. The rest of us were faces.

David E. Hoffman

#2. Soviet authorities had long feared copiers. At its most basic, the machine helped spread information, and strict control of information was central to the Communist Party's grip on power. In most offices, photocopy machines were kept under lock and key.

David E. Hoffman

#3. He [Reagan] was who he was, and it was not complicated. You didn't get a different person in an interview.

David E. Hoffman

#4. The one thing that proved to me you were CIA and not KGB is when you gave me those medicines to test on my daughter. Because the KGB is heartless. They would have given me one pill and said, do it. I knew I was working with a humane organization when you gave me five medicines.

David E. Hoffman

#5. I see in [George H. W.] Bush a striving to be Reagan-like in the sense of having a big vision, and eschewing small details.

David E. Hoffman

#6. 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

#7. Today, we've got what seems to me to be binary-choice politics: black and white, ones and zeros, either you are with me or against me. How did we get here?

David E. Hoffman

#8. I think words were Reagan's greatest weapon - and more powerful than the Strategic Defense Initiative, which did not come to fruition in his lifetime.

David E. Hoffman

#9. Presidents make history but are also a product of it. And there are two kinds: transforming and transactional. Reagan was a transforming president. He made history.

David E. Hoffman

#10. This is a country that can't even make toasters," he said. "And while they can make missiles, they can't feed their population.

David E. Hoffman

#11. I got a response from the front office of the division, 'Risky. Dangerous. Won't work.

David E. Hoffman

#12. My goal was to show the history of the end of the Cold War through both sides - the U.S. side and the Soviet side. I really felt that especially the Soviet side of the story hadn't been well told because we didn't know.

David E. Hoffman

#13. When you look back at the fight against Communism, one thing that is striking is the degree to which we [the United States] were carried on by our own values. One of the real challenges of the new era is going to be to maintain those values and not adopt those of our adversaries.

David E. Hoffman