Quotes About Soviets

#1. I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know that I certainly have. That's easy to do.

Sam Hamill

#2. The Soviets sought not a place in the sun, but the sun itself. Their objective was the world. They would not tolerate compromise on goals, only on tactics.

John Foster Dulles

#3. A more down-to-earth project run by the Soviets had determined that eight square meters of algae - an expanse of pond scum about the size of two ping-pong tables - was needed to keep a single human supplied with oxygen.

Neal Stephenson

#4. Reagan "has conducted an arms race on earth," boomed Mondale. A race generally implies two parties. The Soviets contributed a little bit to this problem, if Mondale had not noticed.

Hugh Sidey

#5. Most of the states of Europe had no prospect of social transformation, and thus little ability to rival or counter the Nazis and the Soviets.

Timothy Snyder

#6. During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

Bob Graham

#7. Soviets always use words which mean almost the reverse of what they mean to us. So peaceful co-existence does not in any way mean peaceful.

Paul Nitze

#8. Americans think Soviets are so grim. I want them to see that they can smile.

Yakov Smirnoff

#9. Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of 'all power to the soviets' were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take. Those

China Mieville

#10. Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

#11. They've done away with those committees. That shows the success of what the Soviets were able to do in this country.

Ronald Reagan

#12. The whole nuclear-arms-control and non-proliferation policy of the nuclear powers is a fraud: The Americans could not prevent the Soviets from replicating their weaponry, and then could not object when the British did the same.

Conrad Black

#13. One is the goals of 9/11 itself, of that attack was to draw the United States into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency as the Soviets had done before them.

Mark Danner

#14. The people of Afghanistan will continue to remember his lasting friendship with the people of Afghanistan as well as his unstinting support during the years of jihad against the Soviets.

Hamid Karzai

#15. That Solidarity was a religious movement no one, least of all the Soviets, can deny. In November 1981, Pravda denounced 'religious fanaticism' as a grave challenge to socialism; failure to contain it, Pravda said, was at the root of the problems in Poland.

Charles Colson

#16. 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

#17. Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me.

Marc Chagall

#18. During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.

Thomas P.M. Barnett

#19. Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#20. Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30

Timothy Snyder

#21. Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.

Robert Dallek

#22. I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.

Amity Gaige

#23. Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control.

Barbara Amiel

#24. In so-called communist Romania, chess was held in high esteem, even if our champions were weaker than the Soviets. This game, this "sport of the mind," was at the time a better way to establish your reputation than literature.

Dumitru Tepeneag

#25. Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.

Dan Rather

#26. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what book he could give the Soviets to teach them about the advantages of American society, he pointed to the Sears catalogue.

Alain De Botton

#27. The Polish people be allowed to have a voice in the kind of govt. they want. Under the Yalta Pact the Soviets agreed they & others would be allowed to do this. The Soviets have never honored that promise.

Ronald Reagan

#28. The Afghans did not have sophisticated weapons like the Soviets did, but with their faith they defeated a superpower.

Abu Bakar Bashir

#29. [The US is] naked, absolutely nude, to attack [by the Soviets].

Dan Quayle

#30. And that, ... is the story of our country, one invasion after another ... Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

Khaled Hosseini

#31. Here were these college kids beating the Soviets and going on to the Olympic Gold Medal. To me, that's the greatest upset of all time in any sport that I can think of.

Jim McKay

#32. As president, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, initiated race-based hiring schemes, signed SALT I with the Soviets and instituted rapprochement with the Red Chinese. All of this resulted in liberals ... despising him even more!

Ann Coulter

#33. The twentieth will be a short century," he said. "Either we or the Soviets will launch the missiles before long, and all the lies will be burned away.

David Burr Gerrard

#34. I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous.

Edward Teller

#35. the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they both invaded. Certainly

Timothy Snyder

#36. To militant Islamists, the expulsion of the Soviets was just the prelude to purging the entire Islamic world of infidels.

Gilles Kepel

#37. In my view, there's no doubt that the Soviets had infinitely greater trouble holding their structure together than we did.

Henry A. Kissinger

#38. Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.

Kit Bond

#39. I looked down at the little pink face in the bundle. A newborn. The child had been alive only minutes but was already considered a criminal by the Soviets.

Ruta Sepetys

#40. At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready.

Elliott Abrams

#41. The president can't tell you what we got. I'll tell you what the world got. The world has a burgeoning nuclear power that didn't, as the Soviets, say "we might defend ourselves in a war."

Mike Huckabee

#42. Maybe we should hold the next [Olympic] games in Afghanistan and hope the Soviets pull out of that one too.

Johnny Carson

#43. There were those within NASA who believed, and would continue to believe for decades into the future, that the government's decision to put all its chips on a short-term strategy to beat the Soviets came at the cost of the opportunity to turn humans into a truly spacefaring species.

Margot Lee Shetterly

#44. There was no testimony of conspiracy - Oswald's efforts to get in touch with the Soviets and with the Cuban Fair Play groups in New York were rebuffed, rebuffed at every step.

John Sherman Cooper

#45. Why should we be closer to the Soviets? Because the Americans have challenged us. America is involved in a conspiracy [against the Arab world], primarily because of its policy toward Israel. In our view, whoever is against the Americans stands with us. The enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Muammar Gaddafi

#46. Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe, together with the greater part of the [German] Reich. All over this territory, which would be of an enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.

Joseph Goebbels

#47. It appears that the Soviets are now going to allow prayer in school. One wonders how soon the United States will catch up.

Jeff Cooper

#48. I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.

Nicholas Royle

#49. President [Ronald] Reagan told me he would negotiate and negotiate and negotiate with the Soviets, and I believed him.

Helmut Schmidt

#50. My dad was in the Swedish armed forces, he was always reading up on different weapons from the Americans and Soviets. When I was a kid, I was in bed looking at his books, reading about the Red Army. So I was very aware of it. I had an interest in military matters ever since.

Dolph Lundgren

#51. Liberals were just as engaged and using the rhetoric of a sort of a battle with the Soviets and with Communism in general, with an evil empire.

Jeff Sharlet

#52. I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.

P. J. O'Rourke

#53. A total nuclear freeze is counterproductive - especially now, when technology is rapidly changing and the Soviets have some important strategic advantages.

Herman Kahn

#54. Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Edward Said

#55. Unless Russia is face with an iron fist and strong language, another is in the making. Only one language do they understand - 'How many divisions have you?' ... I'm tired of babying the Soviets.

Harry S. Truman

#56. In the Soviets' view, chess was not merely an art or a science or even a sport; it was what it had been invented to simulate: war.

Pal Benko

#57. In the years just before ... during the Carter years, the Soviets regularly violated, if you will, both the spirit and theletter of arms control agreements, I think, that they had negotiated during the period of detente.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

#58. [The Soviets] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth; they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Ronald Reagan

#59. I thought that in general we in the United States were too optimistic in believing that the Soviets might alter what had been for a long time, as a matter of fact for centuries, fundamental Russian policies in respect to the rest of the world.

David K. E. Bruce

#60. The Cold War may be 'over' for the West. For the Soviets it has entered a new, active and promising phase.

Anatoliy Golitsyn

#61. Soon after launching Sputnik in 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik II with its passenger Laika ("Barker," also known as Little Curly), the Soviet space dog. She was a female stray found on the streets of Moscow (and those godless Soviets let her die in orbit).

Lily Koppel

#62. The Soviets made me change Romeo and Juliet so that it would have a happy ending, a barbarism, because living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.

Sergey Prokofiev

#63. In another show of America's force to the world, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Carter responded by boycotting the Olympics. And thus was a fearsome blow struck at little fourteen-year-old American girls who had spent their lives training for the Olympics.

Ann Coulter

#64. I believe that when we overdo our military aggressiveness, it actually weakens our national defense. I mean, we stood up to the Soviets. They had 40,000 nuclear weapons. Now we're fretting day in and day and night about third-world countries that have no army, navy or air force.

Ron Paul

#65. Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

Rudy Giuliani

#66. Wipe out the entire defense potential remaining to the Soviets.

Adolf Hitler

#67. Everyone starved. Starvation is a potent weapon, and the Bolsheviks are happy to wield it. The cheapest way to get rid of the opposition is to starve them. Lenin did it the expensive way, shooting them, but the Soviets can no longer afford that.

Jane Smiley

#68. There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.

P. J. O'Rourke

#69. I just don't see this old idea of the Red peril, itching to take over the world. I think you can explain a lot of the Soviets' moves as stemming from a basic sense of insecurity.

John Anderson

#70. And that is how we intend to destroy the enemy!" The superior shakes his head wearily. "Young man, the Soviets are our adversary. The Navy is the enemy.

David Frum

#71. If wars create vast sums of money for the global elite, is it possible the Soviets, the Viet Cong and Muslim extremists were, or are, also fabricated enemies of the West along with North Korea? Or at least exaggerated threats?

James Morcan

#72. I'm a Reagan conservative. Reagan did negotiate with the Soviets. But you have to negotiate from a position of strength.

Rand Paul

#73. Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#74. My opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week than even (sic) the two-and-a-half years before that. It's only now dawning upon the world the magnitude of the action that the Soviets undertook in invading Afghanistan.

Jimmy Carter

#75. As for the United States' future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors - the Soviets and, before them, the British.

Mohammed Omar

#76. Reagan did not wait out the Soviets; he beat them.

Elliott Abrams

#77. Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect."
"Yes, it is. But it is politically correct."
(The Rise of Political Correctness)

Angelo Codevilla