Top 100 Soviet Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.
Henri Lefebvre
#4. 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
#5. Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.
Vladimir Putin
#6. 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
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. We believe we are creating the beginning of a new world order coming out of the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet antagonisms.
Brent Scowcroft
#11. 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
#12. The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.
Vladimir Putin
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The Sandinistas are a tough bunch of guys, with a fabulous amount of Soviet Bloc equipment and Soviet Bloc advisers.
Elliott Abrams
#17. 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
#18. The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).1
Timothy Snyder
#19. If we let Korea down, the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another.
Harry S. Truman
#20. The demise of the American empire will be no more regretted than the demise of the Soviet empire.
Chalmers Johnson
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.
Stephane Hessel
#25. 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
#26. I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us -more evil or as evil as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War.
Joe Lieberman
#27. 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
#28. The triumph of the analytical movement, which formed in the '30's and '40's, was precisely what earned the Soviet masters the acclaim of chessplayers the world over. Unfortunately, it must also be noted that, for today's chessmasters, the watchword is practicality.
Mikhail Botvinnik
#29. It came as a great shock to me when I heard that England and Soviet Russia had become allies. So much so that I thought that the people responsible in London were acting in a manner that no longer coincided with British imperial interests.
John Amery
#30. 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
#31. The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of that Cold War.
Robert Conquest
#32. 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
#33. If the Church is not now as bad as the Soviet Government, that is due to the influence of those who attacked the Church
Bertrand Russell
#34. Soviet-era nostalgia has strong support among the people. But not among the elite and, in my opinion, not with the president. We are not interested in keeping remnants of the communist era alive.
Vladislav Surkov
#35. The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they were Soviet values, as the Soviet leader began to appreciate.
Tony Judt
#36. New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
John Updike
#37. Propaganda was an important arm of the Soviet diplomacy, very important.
Alexander Haig
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Russia is actively using gas diplomacy for its expansion over the ex-Soviet space in a bid to become a regional superpower.
Lilia Shevtsova
#42. We still have many shortcomings and failures to fulfill the Party's demands, especially as regards the liquidation in some of our people of survivals of the accursed past in consciousness and conduct and the fulfillment of the demands of our Soviet ethics and military discipline.
Filipp Golikov
#43. 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
#44. Soviet rocket troops possess enough equipment to be able, if need be, to sweep any aggressor from the face of the earth at whatever point of the globe he may be and whatever military power, territory, or economy he may possess.
Sergey Biryuzov
#45. 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
#46. Unfortunately, the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve.
Michael Gove
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and the lifting of individual agency. What
Timothy Snyder
#50. Soviet imperialism's as bad as American capitalism.
David Mitchell
#51. Our rockets can find Halley's comet, and fly to Venus with amazing accuracy, but side by side with these scientific and technical triumphs is an obvious lack of efficiency in using scientific achievements for economic needs ... many Soviet household appliances are of poor quality.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#52. One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I've seen it three times, is Bondarchuk's 'War and Peace.' Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era.
Baz Luhrmann
#53. I can't imagine any fairminded future person feeling there was an important moral difference between the Soviet gulag and the American one.
Benjamin Kunkel
#54. Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Each side, hypocritical enough to pretend that it lives up to its own hype, is equally insistent that the other side's worst is truly all that it is. American political advertising is sinking slowly toward a level worthy of Soviet propaganda.
Os Guinness
#60. 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
#61. In America, you break law. In Soviet Russia, law breaks you! In America, you watch Big Brother. In Soviet Russia, Big Brother watch you!
Yakov Smirnoff
#62. 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
#63. I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.
Robert Dallek
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Yuri Gagarin had a much more reliable and safe ship than I do. And Soviet ships were death traps.
Andy Weir
#67. In America, your job determines your marks. In Soviet Russia, Marx determine your job!
Yakov Smirnoff
#68. 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
#69. He's got more red flags than Soviet Russia.
Kresley Cole
#70. 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
#71. Or you can be like the Soviet Union, start out with ideals, and end up ceasing to exist.
Steve Earle
#72. 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
#73. Dig your nails deep enough into the back of a Soviet, and eventually you'll find a Russian.
Magnus Flyte
#74. To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.
Julian Barnes
#75. When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.
Osip Mandelstam
#79. 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
#80. I think ex-Soviet or Russian-Jewish women are tougher and that comes through. And if they are more pragmatic than the men, it's because they are obliged to be. They have all the female responsibilities and all the male responsibilities.
David Bezmozgis
#81. 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
#82. If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!
Andrei Platonov
#83. American democracy and the Soviet system may peacefully exist side by side and compete with each other. But one cannot evolve into the other.
J. Stalin
#84. I'm of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little ... Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.
Sasha Roiz
#85. 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
#86. By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.
Barbara Amiel
#87. America likes you only if you're on the side she selects. If you don't go along with her totally, you're automatically considered to have entered the Soviet bloc.
Sukarno
#88. Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.
M. Stanton Evans
#89. A document was drafted in the State Department in July 1946 by an official named Samuel Klaus. This indicated that there were then 20 alleged Soviet agents, 13 alleged Communists, about a dozen sympathizers, and about 75 suspects in the department, according to the FBI.
M. Stanton Evans
#90. I did a long concert tour in England and Denmark and Sweden, and I also sang for the Soviet people, one of the finest musical audiences in the world.
Paul Robeson
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students
Gary Shteyngart
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer. [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]
Anthony Marra
#100. I was very good in math and physics. In the Soviet time, we had a lot of Olympic-style competitions for different disciplines: I was always winning in my region.
Oleg Deripaska
