Top 40 Krastev Quotes
#1. Soft pillows, soft blankets, soft sheets: Her kiss? Sweet, and hard enough to crack your teeth.
Devin Johnston
#2. There is no future in waiting for tomorrow.
Wes Fesler
#3. For the European Union, Russia is as important politically and economically as China is to the U.S.
Ivan Krastev
#4. The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense.
Nor, therefore, can it be an a priori law.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#5. Come up again, dear!" I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else"
but,
Lewis Carroll
#6. Someone once told me they didn't like taking the lid off the kettle because they'd just lose it in the kitchen, so we made a kettle with an attached lid that you slide. It was in response to that that we made one that did something different.
Michael Graves
#7. What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.
Gore Vidal
#8. Spurgeon challenges us to go to the river of our experience, to pull up bulrushes, and to place them in the Ark of our memory, experiencing again the wonder that allowed our infant faith to flourish.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#9. As China is about adaptation, not transformation, it is unlikely to change the world dramatically should it ever assume the global driver's seat. But this does not mean that China won't exploit that world for its own purposes.
Ivan Krastev
#10. Living in truth cannot be reduced to having access to full information.
Ivan Krastev
#11. It is people's willingness to take personal risks and confront the powerful by daring to speak the truth, not the truth itself, that ultimately leads to change.
Ivan Krastev
#12. Any unveiling is also veiling. No matter how transparent our governments want to be, governments will be selectively transparent.
Ivan Krastev
#14. For the Kremlin, it is more feasible to preserve its great-power status in cooperation with the United States than in confrontation.
Ivan Krastev
#15. [It's] difficult to engage people in politics when they believe that what really matters is where they personally stand.
Ivan Krastev
#16. Authoritarianism is not pretending anymore to be a real alternative to democracy, but we can see many more authoritarian practices and styles basically being smuggled into democratic governments.
Ivan Krastev
#17. She's also showing me behavior I've never even heard of, like passenger road rage.
Mary Williams
#18. Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?
John Cleese
#19. The Church of TED is very optimistic. Bulgarians are some of the most pessimistic in the world. There are the Happy, the Unhappy and the Bulgarians.
Ivan Krastev
#20. Breathing: the miracle cure everyone's been looking for." -Lane-
Robyn Schneider
#21. What makes me worry today is the alarming decline in the trust in democratic institutions - political parties, Parliaments, political leaders. Less and less people are going to the polls in most advanced democracies.
Ivan Krastev
#22. Germany, because of the fact and the perception of a special relationship with Russia, is the only one who can influence Russian debate. Russians also believe that Germans understand them best because they've been through a big war and know what humiliation means.
Ivan Krastev
#23. Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions. Transparency is the politics of managing mistrust.
Ivan Krastev
#24. You fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought ...
John Geddes
#25. Regimes like the one in Russia are stabilized by the fact that they have no ideology. There is really no ideological means to attack them.
Ivan Krastev
#27. True, Putin's Russia does not dream of joining the E.U., but Russia's stability depends on preserving the European nature of its regime.
Ivan Krastev
#28. Russians clearly perceive America's global influence as being in irreversible decline and American society shattered by major political, economic and ideological crises.
Ivan Krastev
#29. America is militarily overstretched, politically polarized and financially indebted.
Ivan Krastev
#30. Democracy is the only game in town. The problem is [when] people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing.
Ivan Krastev
#31. In 2008, Putin's message was, 'We aren't like a Central Asian republic, we aren't going to build a personalistic regime, we will have institutions.' This is all abolished now. The very idea of a governing party and party career, as you have in China, that didn't work.
Ivan Krastev
#32. Democracy has always been in crisis: democracy is all about practicing the art of bearable dissatisfaction. In democratic societies, people often complain about their leaders and their institutions. The gap between the ideal democracy and the existing one cannot be bridged.
Ivan Krastev
#34. A more stable relationship between Poland and Russia based on reconciliation might revive the reunification of Europe.
Ivan Krastev
#35. Bulgaria has been deindustrialized by interest groups who extracted state assets like oil states extract the oil in their ground.
Ivan Krastev
#36. The United States and Russia probably do not have common aims and dreams, but they have common worries: Both Washington and Moscow are concerned about the rise of China and are threatened by the rise of radical Islam.
Ivan Krastev
#37. America is a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation of people who never emigrate. Notably, Americans living outside the United States are not called emigrants, but 'expats.'
Ivan Krastev
#38. The E.U. cannot act as guardian of the post-Cold War status quo without risking a collapse of Europe's current institutional infrastructure.
Ivan Krastev
#39. I knew what he was saying, and I wished to God he was someone else, someone who didn't have to say things out loud.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#40. The post-Cold War order in Europe is finished, with Vladimir Putin its executioner. Russia's invasion of Georgia only marked its passing. Russia has emerged as a born-again 19th-century power determined to challenge the intellectual, moral and institutional foundations of the order.
Ivan Krastev
