Soviet Quotes

#1. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.

Paul Theroux

#2. I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

Ayn Rand

#3. The establishment of an American Soviet government will involve the confiscation of large landed estates in town and country, and also, the whole body of forests, mineral deposits, lakes, rivers and so on.

William Z. Foster

#4. After a great deal of discussion in Soviet literature about the correct definition of a combination, it was decided that from the point of view of a methodical approach it was best to settle on this definition - A combination is a forced variation with a sacrifice.

Alexander Kotov

#5. In a 24/7 news cycle, with all the shrieking, howling voices and rapid-response and instant spinning and Soviet-style disinformation-mongering, a good idea has a shelf life of about, um, six seconds.

Christopher Buckley

#6. We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'

Ayn Rand

#7. In 1979, Dubai had learned a valuable lesson from the Iranian Revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: trouble has its bright side.

Misha Glenny

#8. I was proud of my Soviet country, of wearing Young Pioneer uniform, bombarded by my mother's Communist propaganda.

Roustam Tariko

#9. If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.

Bill Ayers

#10. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty,

Masha Gessen

#11. Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.

Nick Turse

#12. Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

Edward Abbey

#13. I have a consistent rule: The American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does.

Ralph Nader

#14. The one great exception to the apathy on reunification is, naturally enough, Berlin. Encircled by the hostile Soviet Zone for ten years, at times blockaded and constantly at the Russians' mercy, Berliners are committed to this one goal with a unique urgency.

J. Anthony Lukas

#15. Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The

Eric Schlosser

#16. In light of 50 years of bondage of Eastern Europe, [invading the Soviet Union in 1948 to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons] was probably a reasonable thing to do.

Condoleezza Rice

#17. When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States' policies of one hundred years ago, but then they always blame America first.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

#18. Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

#19. Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated - preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.

Thomas Sowell

#20. There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union.

Jan Koum

#21. It seems that Russia today - dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror - is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

#22. And this man, who during three long decades had not once remembered that the world contains lilac bushes - and pansies, sandy garden paths, little carts with containers of fizzy water - this man gave a deep sigh, convinced now that life had gone on in his absence, that life had continued. (pg8)

Vasily Grossman

#23. After the Soviet withdrawal, many Afghan Communists had rebranded themselves as Islamists and joined the mujahedeen.

Anand Gopal

#24. Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#25. As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the '50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.

Alexander Haig

#26. All the Baltic countries have been steadfast in support of allies of the United States since they gained their independence following the fall of the Soviet Union and have continued to be supportive in the ongoing war on terror.

John Shimkus

#27. Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.

Vladimir Putin

#28. Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama bin Laden.

Barbara Olson

#29. 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

#30. In those years, it was easier to win the Soviet Championship than a game against 'Iron Tigran'.

Lev Polugaevsky

#31. The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.

Milton Friedman

#32. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.

Rush Limbaugh

#33. Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!

C. Wright Mills

#34. Just as the roads at Moscow's heart flow out in concentric ripples from the Kremlin, so this tension too seems to radiate from those secret and formidable walls, lapping outward to the suburbs and to the farthest confines of the Soviet Union itself, in ever-weakening but pervasive rings.

Colin Thubron

#35. It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.'

Mikhail Gorbachev

#36. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.

Arthur Koestler

#37. Why not admit that the words separation and church do not even appear in the US Constitution, he added. Instead, they do appear in Article 52 of the Constitution of the Soviet Union.

Tim LaHaye

#38. Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.

Richard Lugar

#39. He who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart; he who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head.

Vladimir Putin

#40. Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow.

Barack Obama

#41. I distinctly remember the vivacious optimism that inundated the United States when the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. This was not glee generated by the doom of an implacable enemy, but thrill germinated by the real possibilities that the future held for freedom.

Eskinder Nega

#42. A great deal of the pupils time was spent going through, once again, the History of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union. He had learnt it at elementary school; at secondary school; at his sports club; at the Komsomol; at the university; at a folk dancing course; at the chess-club.

George Mikes

#43. Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

Salman Rushdie

#44. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

Yuval Noah Harari

#45. With us it is not a question of Bolshevism or democracy, but of life or death. A decision in favor of a Soviet could not be opposed by the Young Turks.

Djemal Pasha

#46. This power, this authority, Soviet power: they killed everybody who could make any resistance, who could explain his own way of thinking and who could follow his own way of thinking, of believing.

Vladimir Bukovsky

#47. Few people understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that happened late in the 1980s when the Communist Party had failed to modernize the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Putin

#48. Look at the Afghans, during the time of the Soviet invasion. They were among the poorest Muslims in the world, yet they were sustained by their faith in God, and God alone.

Abu Bakar Bashir

#49. It was not Soviet people who formed the American Communist Party.

J. Stalin

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. The visual impact of a United States battleship springs from its ability to put Soviet ships on the bottom of the sea and to put devastating firepower ashore - nothing else.

John Lehman

#53. Reagan won the Cold War by first restoring America's economy and military and then staring down an economically weakened Soviet Union. He knew defeating Russia couldn't be accomplished without laying the groundwork.

Kathleen Troia McFarland

#54. There was no race - but to the extent that there was an arms competition, it was almost entirely on the Soviet side, first to catch up and then to surpass the Americans.

Herman Kahn

#55. One Saturday, he had gone to take the subway to Pennsylvania Station en route for the Soviet week-end rest camp at Glen Cove, the former Morgan estate on Long Island.

Ian Fleming

#56. The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages ... onward, to victory!

Joseph Stalin

#57. He realized that trust between people is what makes us happy. Any totalitarian state is based on betrayal. It needs people to inform on each other, to avoid socializing to interact only through the state and to avoid unsanctioned meetings.

Oliver Bullough

#58. And the only forms of socialism in the world that were then getting results - malign ones, as it was - were the Fascist and Soviet republics. Fascism is a form of socialism - you rebuild the country, you find a scapegoat, and you go from there.

James Ellroy

#59. Since much of the ocean floor remains unexplored (except perhaps for still-classified data acquired by the U.S. and Soviet navies), we may know more about the surface topography of Venus than about any other planet, Earth included.

Carl Sagan

#60. There are also many instances where people hostile to the Soviet state are attempting by means of deceit and provocation to poison the minds of our citizens and compel them to believe in monstrous lies.

Filipp Golikov

#61. All through the years of the Soviet empire, its Politburo held 'elections.' Of course, calling something an election and actually having it be an election are different things.

Benazir Bhutto

#62. The USA and the Soviet Union each had the ability to annihilate the other. Therefore- in theory at least-neither of these growling superpowers would dare attack the other, because to do so would result in its own immolation.

Mal Peet

#63. Every man must be made to realize that further retreat is impossible. He must realize with his mind and heart that this is a matter of life and death of the Soviet state, of the life and death of the people of our country ... the Nazi troops must be stopped now, before it is too late.

Leonid Brezhnev

#64. Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!

Nigel Hamilton

#65. 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

#66. If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Bukovsky

#67. 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

#68. Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

Paul Samuelson

#69. The miracle of Grenada is how quickly the Cuban workers beat their plowshares into Soviet AK-47s.

William Cohen

#70. And the big question for the West, of course, and to the Europeans is, what other countries, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, should be incorporated into western institutions?

Samuel P. Huntington

#71. It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.

Andrew Sullivan

#72. What people recognize is that there's a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward.

Michele Bachmann

#73. 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

#74. She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love.

David Remnick

#75. People ask if I regret not winning a Stanley Cup, but winning the series against the Soviet Union was the best. It was the greatest experience of my hockey career by far.

Marcel Dionne

#76. Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as "imperialist" as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.

William L. Shirer

#77. My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.

Amity Gaige

#78. A Soviet man is a product of invisible changes, degradation and progressive deformation. Breaking the chain of those changes is hard. Perhaps they are irreversible.

Merab Mamardashvili

#79. We must not fall into the trap of projecting our own morality onto the Soviet leaders. They do not share our aspirations, they are not constrained by our ethics, they always consider themselves exempt from the rules that bind other states.

Margaret Thatcher

#80. When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.

Alex North

#81. The breakup of the Soviet Union is a national tragedy on an enormous scale only the elites and nationalists of the republics gained.

Vladimir Putin

#82. In America, you drive car. In Soviet Russia, car drive you!

Yakov Smirnoff

#83. In the Soviet Union we have a saying, a pessimist is someone who believes things can't get any worse. An optimist thinks maybe they can.

Abel Aganbegyan

#84. The constitution of Soviet Russia must insure equal rights for all citizens regardless of sex, creed, race, or nationality.

Vladimir Lenin

#85. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#86. Nothing in our lifetimes has been more heartening than when people of the former Soviet Union and Central Europe broke the grip of communism. We have aided their progress and I am proud of it.

William J. Clinton

#87. The Soviet Union has become the seacoast of the universe.

Sergei Korolev

#88. I feel the happiest when I can light my American cigarettes with Soviet matches.

Mohammed Daoud Khan

#89. We need to make it very clear to the Iranians, the same way we made it clear to the Soviet Union and China, that their first use of nuclear weapons would result in the devastation of their nation.

John Abizaid

#90. The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

George Will

#91. It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

Joseph Brodsky

#92. I said in court a long time ago that I didn't see that the Soviet Union was significantly helped by the information I gave them, nor that the United States was significantly harmed.

Aldrich Ames

#93. At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone

George Orwell

#94. In the first day of the Soviet Army's arrival, I and the other comrades were isolated and then found ourselves here, not knowing anything ... I can only conjecture what could have happened.

Alexander Dubcek

#95. It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

Dalai Lama

#96. There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.

Tom Clancy

#97. After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.

Leon Panetta

#98. I told him that neither he nor anyone else should ever underestimate the strength and power of the United States: those who had - Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union - were all now in the ashcan of history.

Robert M. Gates

#99. With respect to the situation in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, in both countries the Soviet Union had been working hard to create an infrastructure of those who shared their point of view and were prepared to take over the countries.

Paul Nitze

#100. Think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela. These countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.

Barack Obama