Top 100 Quotes About Soviet Union
#1. Then I was lucky I met with my future husband, and I started new life with my husband, and I was happy again. He was a musician. I start to travel with him through Europe also and around the former Soviet Union.
Olga Korbut
#2. If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.
Ronald Reagan
#3. Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#4. It is not true that were the Soviet Union to disappear the remaining states could easily live in peace.
Kenneth Waltz
#5. So seven new countries, three of them formerly part of the Soviet Union, and the others part of the Warsaw Pact, will become full members of NATO next year.
Lord Robertson
#6. By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.
Barbara Amiel
#7. Starting reforms in the Soviet Union was only possible from above, only from above. Any attempt to go from below was suppressed, suppressed in a most resolute way.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#8. When I was a kid, I was like everyone else: afraid of getting nuked. We had drills in school - Sweden was very close to the Soviet Union. There was definitely a lot of tension.
Dolph Lundgren
#9. Honduras is strongly anti-Communist, maintains no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and has provided vital support for United States-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
Stephen Kinzer
#10. Why should the Negroes ever fight against the only nations of the world where racial discrimination is prohibited, and where the people can live freely? Never! I can assure you, they will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the peoples' democracies.
Paul Robeson
#11. If you're so committed to liberty that you see the Soviet Union as a threat, you're a Republican. If you're kind of indifferent to freedom and the level of the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union is just a question of extent and not really threatening to anybody, then you're a Democrat.
Grover Norquist
#12. I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.
Aldrich Ames
#13. I look at Obama, a young man, a good-looking person. That is my first impression, I feel sorry for him. He looks 100 percent like Lukashenko, when I came to power after the breakup of the Soviet Union
Alexander Lukashenko
#14. It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?
Samuel P. Huntington
#15. The countries that have risen and separated out as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union are, on the whole, following freer economic policies. Most of these states have freer government and less restrictions on trade.
Milton Friedman
#16. When we do in Grenada what the Soviet Union did in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, we lose moral authority and credibility.
Jesse Jackson
#17. 1989 was such a very, very important year in Europe. The wall fell, the Soviet Union was crumbling, and so many things happened - in 15 minutes, the world changed.
Per Petterson
#18. For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world.
Pankaj Mishra
#19. The Communist Party of China is a party that seeks peace, harmony and reconciliation, unlike the Communist Party of the former Soviet Union
Zheng Bijian
#20. The America in which we grew up is vastly different from the America the secular-socialist Left want to create. And that's why saving America is the fundamental challenge of our time. The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.
Newt Gingrich
#21. We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.
Satish Kumar
#22. I've never been to the Soviet Union and the main reason for that is I was warned several times by people from the KGB who had defected to the West that it would be very unsafe for me to go there
Brian Crozier
#23. It was almost forbidden in the Soviet Union to study the New Economic Policy.
Anatoly Chubais
#24. The case of Afghanistan vs. the Soviet Union is the clearest case of good against evil that I've seen in my lifetime. I thought it was terrific the way they got their country back.
William T. Vollmann
#25. I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.
Rose Wilder Lane
#26. In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
Tom Clancy
#27. Even now, the irony that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians.
Richard Perle
#28. 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.
Tariq Ali
#29. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?
Glenn Greenwald
#30. I am a Soviet born American Jew. I was born in and left Soviet Union, while it was and in some cases still is, oppressive and socialist nation. I love America and being an American. I could never understand, why would people willingly give up their freedom!!
Jake Danishevsky
#31. Russia was allowed to inherit the Soviet Union's seat on the UN Security Council when that organization, which had been designed to preserve the Cold War status quo, should instead have been reformed to reflect the new primacy of the free world.
Garry Kasparov
#32. The Soviet Union's propaganda clearly wishes to use public opinion in this country to get the West to reduce its own arms while doing nothing themselves. In this way they would gain nuclear superiority. This is simply not on.
James Callaghan
#33. Well, the Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside Soviet Union, there's no doubt about that.
Gianni Agnelli
#34. If political scientists couldn't predict the downfall of the Soviet Union - perhaps the most important event in the latter half of the twentieth century - then what exactly were they good for?
Nate Silver
#35. The ultimate goal of the whole policy of peaceful co-existence was to make progress on the basic goal laid down by Lenin of a world largely composed of socialist, communist states, in which the Soviet Union would be the prime mover.
Paul Nitze
#36. We have to re-invent socialism. It can't be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition,
Hugo Chavez
#37. When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction ...
Milton Friedman
#38. As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.
Jerry Brown
#39. The Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy, and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union.
Giovanni Agnelli
#40. Nixon tried to wrap the Soviet Union into a web of agreements that would constrain its behavior. What happened is that many people lost faith in that approach, not the least because of how the Soviets handled it.
David Hoffman
#41. To give [the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba] even covert support is on a par with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere. This point will not be lost on the rest of the world, nor on our own consciences.
J. William Fulbright
#42. When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.
Jan Koum
#43. 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
#44. In Soviet times, the border was closed, so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.
Wladimir Klitschko
#45. Or you can be like the Soviet Union, start out with ideals, and end up ceasing to exist.
Steve Earle
#46. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, most of us didn't even have the feeling that the country was falling apart. We thought we would continue with our lives as in the past, but as good neighbors.
Vladislav Surkov
#47. Happy hour is slightly different in the Soviet Union. There are no ice cubes or orange-peel twists in the vodka. Also, it lasts all day.
P. J. O'Rourke
#48. I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don't want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.
Thomas Piketty
#49. Anyone who would understand the Reagan victory of 1980 and the movement that eliminated the Soviet Union and revitalized America must read-indeed must study-Craig Shirley's brilliant, comprehensive work.
Newt Gingrich
#50. I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.
Robert Dallek
#51. When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
Peter Thiel
#52. Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.
Amartya Sen
#53. 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.
Fareed Zakaria
#54. The chief task was to stop the arms race before it brought utter disaster. However, after the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, any rationale for having nuclear weapons disappeared.
Joseph Rotblat
#56. We will always apply the same principles of collective security, prudent caution, and superior weaponry that enabled us to peacefully prevail in the long cold war against the Soviet Union.
Theodore C. Sorensen
#57. The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle.
Eric Schlosser
#58. There is no way to avoid the reality that the American government in the past years has been the most spectacularly hypocrisy-driven government in the world. We rival the Soviet Union in some stages, in some ways, in hypocrisy.
Michael Scheuer
#59. As fur sneak nuclear attacks on anithir country, there was only wan state in history had ever done that, an it wiznae the fuckin Soviet Union.' - McCann
Iain Banks
#60. After the Cold War ended, there was an agreement between the former Soviet Union and America to convert weapons-grade nuclear materials into reactor-grade materials. So disarmament and nuclear energy actually are strongly linked.
Susan Eisenhower
#61. I remember as a child going to an exhibit about the Soviet Union, and every paper had this alien smell. The paper and the ink were all exported. It was like a piece of cheese from that country, you could touch it, feel it, smell it, and it was different.
Ben Katchor
#62. Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.
Ken Hollings
#63. New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
John Updike
#64. All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?
Ken Livingstone
#65. 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
#66. There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Soviet Union, no China, no Taiwan ... Rivers flow unimpeded across the swaths of continents. The persistent tides - the pulse of the sea - do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#67. If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.
Graham Greene
#68. Like so many empires before it, the Soviet Union eventually imploded and fragmented, falling victim not so much to a direct military defeat as to disintegration accelerated by economic and social strains.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#69. I remember as a child hearing of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union. There was supposedly only one kind of store, a gigantic windowless dispensary staffed by listless, surly functionaries selling cheaply made, generic goods. It sounds a lot like Wal-Mart.
Charles Eisenstein
#70. Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.
P. J. O'Rourke
#71. Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.
George F. Kennan
#72. Say that he was right about how bad it was in the Soviet Union, but he just didn't understand the nice materialism of the West. Say that the Soviet Union was bad because the people were deprived of meaningless creature comforts, and that the West is good because the people are flooded with them.
Anthony Esolen
#73. World's most widely read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min, and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia.
Steven Pinker
#74. War reporter Lawrence Sheets's edgy memoir evokes exactly the fatalism, confusion, and centrifugal forces that suddenly broke up the Soviet Union two decades ago. Refreshingly free of faraway theorizing, this book focuses on what people actually saw and experienced in those years.
Hugh Pope
#75. The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.
Vladimir Putin
#76. Look at South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. They still have many problems, setbacks as well as breakthroughs, but basically changes have happened that were considered unthinkable a decade ago.
Dalai Lama
#77. If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.
John C. Wright
#78. If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.
Evgeny Morozov
#79. If we look at where relations between the Soviet Union and Germany were in 1945 and where we stand now, then we have achieved so much.
Angela Merkel
#80. Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.
Vladimir Putin
#81. Given the choice between fulfilling love and a washing machine, young people in the U.S. and the Soviet Union both chose the washing machine.
Kristin Ross
#82. The Soviet Union and its empire disappeared in large part because its smokestack economy could no longer keep up with the technological progress of the world's major economic powers.
John Mearsheimer
#83. I grew up a little girl in the Soviet Union playing at a small sports club. Tennis gave me my life.
Anna Kournikova
#84. I did Our Daily Bread for King and that made me popular in the Soviet Union; King was amused by that.
Karen Morley
#85. So I want to thank the Pentagon, the Soviet Union and the military-industrial complex from the bottom of my heart. Without them, I could never have become the man I am today.
George Carlin
#86. If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.
George Galloway
#87. Already liberals are trying to rewrite the history of the Cold War to remove Reagan from its core, to make him a doddering B-movie actor who happened to be standing there when the Soviet Union imploded. They have the media, the universities, the textbooks. We have ourselves. We are the witnesses.
Ann Coulter
#88. Mr. Gorbachev initiated Glasnost, Perestroika, so he was already, you know, way disenchanted with the rigid Communist ideology, and he was looking to become an international leader. He was more accepted actually outside of the Communist Soviet Union than inside.
Deepak Chopra
#89. I wouldn't even go into the history of the last days of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal from Europe, and what promises were given at that time, because those were oral promises, and our leaders of that time strongly believe that, like in ancient Russia, a word given is better than any treaty.
Sergei Lavrov
#90. The Soviet Union represents a threat in terms of might. It is a joke in terms of its economy and what it has to offer the Third World - a laughingstock to countries that are looking for an economic-development model.
Jack Kemp
#91. This bill reminds me of the tactics of the former Soviet Union and we know how successful that was.
Virginia Foxx
#92. Soviet Union foreign policy is a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma, and the key is Russian nationalism.
Winston Churchill
#93. I am lucky, .. that the popular sport in the Soviet Union was chess and not baseball.
Garry Kasparov
#94. At my first press conference I was asked whether we could trust the Soviet Union, and I said that the answer to that question could be found in the writings of Soviet leaders: It had always been their philosophy that it was moral to lie or cheat for the purpose of advancing Communism.
Ronald Reagan
#95. Never mind Communist solidarity, China and the Soviet Union wanted to do business with the likes of Hyundai and Samsung, not with state-owned enterprises in the North that didn't pay their bills on time.
Barbara Demick
#96. Under Lenin the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the U.S. Post Office.
Jimmy Carter
#97. The most cost-effective move we could make in defense spending would be to shift the focus of CIA operations, giving this agency the directive to make trouble for the Soviet Union.
John P. Wheeler III
#98. 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
#99. Communism is born out of misery, and if the West does not show more understanding, those people will take up arms and turn to others, that is the Soviet Union.
Francois Mitterrand
#100. If you ask anyone on any street corner in the world what the Soviet Union looks like, they would probably have very strong opinions. And they probably would be wrong.
Rick Smolan
